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UNITED STATES OF AMEBIOA. 



TALK AT A COUNTRY 
HOUSE 




Henry Slrachey, Pinx 



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1834 



HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & C 0. 



TALK AT A COUNTRY 
HOUSE 

FACT AND FICTION 



SIR EDWARD STRACHEY, Bart. 



When each by turns was guide to each, 
And Fancy light from Fancy caught, 
And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought 

Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech. 

In Memoriant 







BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 



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Copyright, 1894, 
By EDWARD STRACHEY. 

A// righU reserved. 



The Riverside Prf.ts, Cambridge., Mass., U.S.A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 



Ni 



THIS BOOK 

IS INSCRIBED 

TO MY CHILDREN 

WHOSE LOVE AND CARE HAVE MADE FOR ME 

A HAPPY OLD AGE 

AND ESPECIALLY TO 

MY DAUGHTER FRANCES 

WHOSE CONSTANT AND UNTIRING SERVICES 

HAVE MORE THAN SUPPLIED THE PLACE 

OF FAILING EYESIGHT 

AND SO TURNED LOSS TO GAIN. 



CONTENTS 



I. 

THE SQUIRE AND HIS OLD MANOR PLACE. 

The Squire and his old House. — Arrivai. — Talk about 
Building Bess. — Berowne's Oak. — Love's Labour 's 
Lost, — Idea or Motive of the Play . . . , ^ . . i 



n. 



The Giant's Wall. — The Rose Garden.— Persian Poetry. 

— Muhammedan and Christian Mystics. — The Ata- 
baks. — The Use and Disuse of Persian in India . . 14 

in. 

THE OLD HALL AND THE PORTRAITS. 

The Old Hall. — The Children dancing. — The Portraits. 

— John Locke and John Strachey, Clive, Watson, Kirk- 
patrick. — Burke and Sir William Jones. — The Nego- 
tiation with the United States 41 



IV. 



A General Election. — The Candidature. — The Polling 
Day. — Before and after the Ballot Act. — Counting 



viii Contents 



the Votes. — The Winner and his Welcome Home. — 
The Morality of the Ballot 66 



LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 

A Country Wedding. — The Village Church. — The Vil- 
lage Home. — Wedding Breakfasts. — Love and Mar- 
riage. — Death and Life 94 



VL 



BOOKS : TENNYSON AND MAURICE. 

Books, — The Bible and Shakespeare. — Paradise Lost 
and the Pilgrim's Progress. — The Riddle of the 
Sphinx. — Crossing the Bar. — The Poet and the 
Prophet. — The Crimean War. — The King's College 
Story 



VII. 



RIDING DOWN TO CAMELOT. 

The Camelot and Arthur of History. — Of Local Tra- 
dition and Legend. — Of Romance. — Of Modern 
Poetry. — Chivalry. — Sir Thomas Malory. — Idylls 
of the King 150 

vin. 

y 

THE ARROWHEADED INSCRIPTIONS. 

Decipherment. — Criticism and Divination. — Ideographic 
and Alphabetical Writing. — Assyrian Annals. — Light 
thrown on Jewish History. — German Criticism. — 
How estimated by Grote 1 79 



Contents ix 



IX. 

TAKING LEAVE. 

'1 aking Leave. — :6mile Souvestre. — Old Age. — Mem- 
ory. — Pope and Parnell. — Edward Lear. — A Retro- 
spect 209 



APPENDIX. 

Introduction to the Bustan or Garden of Sa'di, translated 
from the Persian 237 



TALK AT A COUNTRY HOUSE 



THE SQUIRE AND HIS OLD MANOR PLACE. 

And one, an English home, — gray twilight pour'd 

On dewy pastures, dewy trees, 
Softer than sleep, — all things in order stored, 
A haunt of ancient Peace. 

Palace of Art. 

While traveling abroad some years ago I 
had made the acquaintance of an old Somer- 
setshire country gentleman : we had become 

" A pair of friends, though I was young, 
And Matthew seventy-two," 

and now, on my coming back to England, he 
had invited me to pay him a visit. 

The Squire, as his family and his neighbors 
called him, was past work, as he used to say, 
but not past the enjoyments of an old age 
spent in the home which he shared with his 
children and grandchildren. And as he loved 
his bit of Chaucer, he would apply to himself 
the description of the Clerk, — 

" And gladly would he learn and gladly teach." 



Talk at a Country House 



He liked to talk of the old house which I was 
now about to see. And I think that my friend's 
character as I knew him had been a good deal 
formed by the influences of the house in which 
he was born and looked to die. Though he 
mourned the destruction of some very old fea- 
tures of the house, and the things in it, some 
of which had still existed in his own child- 
hood, yet he had made like changes when he 
himself came into possession ; and he used to 
say that he had the authority of Carlyle and 
Maurice for so doing — the former advising 
him ever to join the new with the old, and the 
latter not to scruple to make the house he 
was to live in fitting in all respects for his 
own generation. He loved books of all kinds, 
but poetry and history most of all : and I fan- 
cied when I came to know him in his old hall 
and parlor, as well as under his old trees, 
that these things had both limited and deep- 
ened his reading. He used to say that his 
motto was " Multum non multa," which he 
translated " Not many things, but much of two 
or three." 

He loved what have been called the by- 
ways of history. " Why," he would say, " go 
along the dusty high road, when you may get 
to the same place by the path across the fields, 
and have shrubs and flowers, and the songs of 
the birds, all along, instead of the dust." And 



The Squire and his Old Manor Place 3 

when I reminded him of what came to Chris- 
tian and Hopeful in his favorite " Pilgrim's 
Progress," when they preferred the walk 
through the fields, he only answered with a 
smile : — 

"John p. 
Robinson, he ' 

Sez they did n't know everythin' down in Judee." 

From the railway station I drove along the 
road by which Leland had ridden four hundred 
and fifty years before, when he was on the like 
errand to my own, that of visiting the old 
Manor Place of Southetoune. Now, as then, 
the road was " meatly well woddyd." 

Evening was coming on when I drove through 
the lodge gates. The air was resonant with 
the cawing of the rooks as they filled the sky 
with the circles in which they wheeled to and 
fro, disappearing in the distance, to appear 
again, and so gradually reach their roosting- 
trees. In spite of their blackness where they 
did not catch and reflect back the rays of the 
setting sun, I might call them a coruscation 
of rooks, so much did they remind me of the 
Roman Girandola, when the sky was filled with 
its countless flights of rockets. I saw before 
me, and on my right hand, two giant arbors — 
'• aisles," Tennyson would have called them ■ — • 
of lime-trees, feathering to the ground, and 
seeming to reach the very sky ; while between 



Talk at a Country House 



them opened out an avenue of immemorial 
elms. On my left I saw, as Leland had seen 
them before me, the old battlemented wall and 
the square tower with its corner turret rising 
behind and above the wall, and a succession 
of gables on either side ; and among them I 
saw one marked by a cross which I knew must 
be that of the chapel which my old friend had 
told me of, as the work of Building Bess of 
Hardwicke, afterwards Countess of Shrews- 
bury. Like the Roman Coliseum before it was 
scraped by the modern reformers, the old bat- 
tlemented wall had a flora of its own : ferns, 
crimson valerian, snapdragons, and briar roses, 
and along with these I saw an ash and a yew 
growing on the battlements, where they had 
been sown no doubt by the rooks. And as I 
passed through an archway in the wall, the 
whole house came in view. It was not a castle, 
nor a palace, but it might be called a real 
though small record of what men had been 
doing there from the time of Domesday Book 
to our own. 

The Squire welcomed me with his usual 
heartiness, introducing me to the ladies of the 
family, and then adding : " But you know Foster 
already : you have often met him at Headlong 
Hall. I am glad he has not brought Mr. Escot 
wdth him." The Squire was fond of quoting 
Peacock's derivation of the name of Foster in 



The Squire and his Old Manor Place 5 

" Headlong Hall," as that of " one who watches 
over and guards the light," telling us that it 
suited my habit of asking questions. 

Next morning we had breakfast in a parlor 
the oak paneling and carved mantelpiece of 
which, the Squire said, were among the embel- 
lishments of the old manor place made by- 
Building Bess of Hardwicke, to one of whose 
four husbands the house belonged. After 
breakfast we walked together down the steps 
of the terraces, and through the avenue of 
huge lime-trees and oaks, which my host told 
me were all planted by the same great lady. 
My thoughts wandered from that imperious 
dame to her still more imperious mistress. 
Queen Elizabeth, and from Queen Elizabeth 
to Shakespeare, and so to the Forest of Arden 
and to the park of the king of Navarre. It 
was in the leafy month of June. The air was 
fragrant with honeysuckle and sweetbrier grow- 
ing along the banks of a brook hidden from 
sight, but telling of itself by the pleasant noise 
of a little waterfall into which it was breaking ; 
and the musical hum of unseen insects was all 
around, through which was now and then heard 
the cooing of a wood pigeon hidden somewhere 
in the trees. We stopped under a great oak, 
and sat down in the shade, on a mossy seat 
formed by the roots of the tree. 



Talk at a Country House 



" What are you thinking of ? " said the 
Squire, who had been silent since he had fin- 
ished pointing out the works of the lady I have 
named. 

I answered that I was thinking this was the 
oak in the branches of which Berowne lay hid 
while he listened to the talk of the king and 
his other lords. 

" I am glad to hear you call him, as Shake- 
speare himself did, ' Berowne.' I respect as 
well as like the Cambridge editors, but I can- 
not conceive why they should substitute the 
spelling of the Second Folio, which has no au- 
thority, for that of the Quarto and the First 
Folio." 

My old friend seemed inclined to be warm 
on this point, so I turned the subject by say- 
ing, " I know you do not make much account 
of internal evidence, but do you not think there 
is something in the case of ' Love's Labour 's 
Lost ' to show that it was one of the earliest of 
Shakespeare's plays ? " 

The Squire. I can seldom find that the so- 
called internal evidence as to the date of any 
book is more than critical, that is more or less 
ingenious, conjecture. Where are you to stop 
if, after finding all the buoyancy and bright- 
ness of youth in this play, you go on (like 
Hallam, if I remember rightly) to discover a 
disappointed, it may be melancholy, and even 



The Squire and his Old Manor Place 7 

a misanthropical Shakespeare in " Hamlet " 
and " Timon," drawn from the experiences of 
manhood and old age ? 

Foster. I confess that internal evidence is 
for the most part like a circle in the water, — 

" Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, 
Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to nought." 

Yet does not the circle start from a real stone 
thrown in ? 

The Squire. Or from some bubble rising 
from we know not where ? Yet I am inclined 
to yield to you here, and to make an exception 
in favor of the indications that this was one of 
the earliest, if not the earliest, of Shakespeare's 
plays. Ferdinand and Miranda, Romeo and 
Juliet, are even more perfect representatives 
of the youth and maiden than are Berowne and 
Rosaline ; yet while these last require only that 
the poet's pen should be dipped in ink " tem- 
per'd by Love's sighs," it may have been that 
the others could not have been depicted but 
by an eye 

" That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." 

Besides, " I too once lived in Arcady," and I 
should like to hear w^hat you have still to say 
of the idea, or, as I suppose people would now 
call it, the motive, of " Love's Labour 's Lost," 
and what it may possibly tell us of the poet 
himself, and so of its probable date. 



8 Talk at a Country House 

Foster. I can hardly pretend to add any- 
thing to what Coleridge has already said on 
the subject. 

The Squire. There is, indeed, not much 
more to be said when Coleridge has spoken, 
and his words have come down to us ; yet — 
forgive the impertinence — a dwarf on a giant's 
shoulders may see farther than the giant him- 
self. 

Foster. Artists say that a portrait, while it 
must be true to nature and a likeness of the 
individual whom it represents, must, if it be 
a true work of art, show the idea, or motive, 
either of calm repose or of the animation of 
the moment in which one characteristic expres- 
sion is passing into another. And the motive 
of this play may, I think, be said to be youth 
at the moment of passing into manhood and 
womanhood. Boys and girls become dignified 
men and women before our eyes ; and it is 
love which makes the magic change, — a 
change which Berowne describes in words so 
burning yet so pure and chaste, so passionate 
yet spiritual, that I, at least, can never read or 
repeat them too often : — 

" Other slow arts entirely keep the brain ; 
And therefore, finding barren practisers, 
Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil : 
But love, first learned in a lady's eyes, 
Lives not alone immured in the brain ; 
But, with the motion of all elements, 



The Squire and his Old Alanor Place 9 

Courses as swift as thought in every power, 

And gives to every power a double power, 

Above their functions and their offices. 

It adds a precious seeing to the eye ; 

A lovers eyes will gaze an eagle blind ; 

A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound, 

When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd : 

Love's feeling is more soft and sensible 

Than are the tender horns of cockled snails ; 

Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste : 

For valour, is not Love a Hercules, 

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides ? 

Subtle as Sphinx ; as sweet and musical 

As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair : 

And when Love speaks, the voice' of all the gods 

Make heaven drowsy with the harmony. 

Never durst poet touch a pen to write 

Until his ink were temper'd with Love's sighs ; 

O, then his lines would ravish savage ears 

And plant in tyrants mild humility. 

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive : 

They sparkle still the right Promethean fire ; 

They are the books, the arts, the academes, 

That show, contain and nourish all the world : 

Else none at all in aught proves excellent." 

The Squire. They are indeed perfect ; and 
we may well say with Berowne that when such 
" Love speaks, the voice' of all the gods make 
heaven drowsy with the harmony." Does not 
Coleridge say that this speech is that of the 
very god of love himself } But go on. 

Foster. The ladies in the play, as in nature, 
are at first inclined to make fun of the serious 
ardor of their admirers, till the whole scene 
becomes a tilting-match or tournament of wits, 



lo Talk at a Country House 

in which — again with truth to nature — the 
ladies get the better, and the men confess 
themselves " beaten with pure scoff." But Love 
is becoming lord of all with the ladies, too. 
Another transition is marked when the princess 
exclaims, " We are wise girls to mock our lovers 
so ! " Then come the tidings of the death of 
her father, the king of France. In a moment 
the electric spark crystallizes that life of fun 
and joyousness. The generous and noble- 
minded youths and maidens become, as I have 
said, dignified men and women, and turn to 
the duties of real life, though agreeing that the 
new is still to be linked with the old. If the 
poet had told us the real ending, he would 
have called the play " Love's Labour 's Won," 
and so anticipated the answer to a still vexed 
question of Dr. Dryasdust. 

The Squire. Well done ! I wish every one 
knew, and then he would prize this play as 
you do. But how does all this prove the early 
date of the play ? 

Foster. You yourself said just now that you 
were inclined to recognize a distinction be- 
tween the creations of Ferdinand and Miranda, 
and Romeo and Juliet, and those of Berowne 
and Rosaline. I think this is so, and that we 
must not look in this play for the expression 
of that mature genius which we find in the later 
works. But of the genius itself, not yet ma- 



The Squire and his Old Ma?ior Place 1 1 

ture, we have abundant tokens ; and here is, 
in truth, one especial charm and interest of 
this play. How pleasant it is to look at the 
portraits of Milton, the child, the youth, and 
the man, and to trace the lineaments of moral 
and intellectual as well as physical beauty in 
their successive developments, — the child sur- 
viving in the man, and the man fulfilling the 
promise of the child ! And though no such 
portraiture of Shakespeare's face in youth ex- 
ists for us, we have the portrait of his mind iR 
its successive stages of growth, if we follow 
Ben Jonson's advice and 

" looke 
Not on his picture, but his Booke ; " 

and again : — 

" Look, how the father's face 
Lives in his issue ; even so the race 
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines 
In his well turned and true filed lines." 

The Squire. You remember that Ben Jonson 
said something on the other side, — that he 
wished Shakespeare had blotted a thousand 
lines. 

Foster. Yes, but the reconciliation is obvi- 
ous as we read ; for we know Shakespeare does 
write with an accuracy as well as profoundness 
of thought which must have been the fruit of 
the highest intellectual training and culture ; 
with an ease and a fluency of utterance which 



12 Talk at a Country House 

sometimes verges on carelessness and negli- 
gence of language, and shows especially when 
the poet is under the influence of his love of 
fun. But his play of " Love's Labour 's Lost " is 
remarkable for its careful accuracy of thought 
and word even in its fun, and indicates how 
much Shakespeare must, in the days of his 
earliest compositions, have studied the logical 
use of language, even when he is employing it 
to express the most fanciful conceits or the 
most soaring imaginations. The play is full 
of instances of this careful composition, with 
its regular balance of thoughts, words, and 
rhymes in the successive lines. This use of 
language is perfect in its kind ; yet how dif- 
ferent it is from that of "The Tempest," 
"Othello," or "Hamlet"! Surely, the differ- 
ence between the youthful and the mature 
genius is plain enough. 

The Squire. Yes, and you have made a good 
defense — or explanation shall I call it? — of 
Coleridge's saying that this play is like a por- 
trait of the poet taken in his boyhood. And 
let me confess to you that when I was young I 
myself wrote an argument in the same sense, 
endeavoring to show, by an analysis of Be- 
rowne's speech against learning, how exactly 
it must have represented Shakespeare's own 
experiences and conclusions as to the relations 
between the study of books and the knowledge 



The Squire and his Old Manor Place 13 

of life, when he first came up to London with 
his small Latin and less Greek.^ 

Then we got up, and walked to the wooden 
bridge which crossed the brook just above the 
waterfall ; and I saw the small red and blue 
dragonflies and one great brown one — so 
formidable looking, though so harmless — dart- 
ing to and fro over the water ; and a kingfisher 
shot, flashing in the sunlight, from a hawthorn 
bush upon the bank. 

1 Eraser s Magazine, January, 185S, p. 41. 



II. 

PERSIAN POETRY. 

The roses of this garden will not fade. 



Sa'di. 



The Squire loved his limes, elms, and oaks, 
but he loved his roses, too. They festooned 
the transoms of the old mullioned windows of 
the parlor, and might be gathered from the case- 
ment of my lady's chamber ; and they stood in 
array under the shelter of what still remained 
of the great battlemented wall, which had once 
protected the house and tower against arrows 
and bolts as it still did from the north winds. 
The Squire told me tradition related that this 
wall was built by the Norman giant, St. Loe, 
who lived in the tower. This tradition was au- 
thenticated by the fact that a neighboring giant, 
Hakewell, whose quoit still remains in witness, 
on passing by asked what he was building this 
wall for ; and when he was answered, " To 
keep out such fellows as you," Hakewell at 
once stepped over it ; and the effigies of both 
giants, one in oak and the other in stone, may 
still be seen in the parish church. Leland, in- 



Persian Foctry 15 



deed, writing in Henry VIII. 's time, says only, 
" Here hath Sir John St. Loe an old manor 
place," and adds that the monument of his 
grandfather is in the church. Modern ar- 
chaeologists, moreover, declare that the quoit 
is only one of the huge Druidical stones of 
which more than one circle remains hard by. 
But the wall itself, as I have said, stands there 
to testify, and to shelter the Squire's roses. 

He was gathering a nosegay of these when I 
joined him. As he stood by a great bush of 
the kind called " maiden blush," he gently shook 
from a flower one of those bright green rose- 
chafers which live on that rose, repeating, as it 
flew off, " A mailed angel on a battle day." I 
said, " Why do you drive away the pretty crea- 
ture .'' " " Because I might have ' maiden shriek ' 
for ' maiden blush,' " he answered, " if I were to 
offer a young lady a green beetle with my roses." 
He walked toward a carriage, which I had not 
seen before, in which were a mother and daugh- 
ter, who had been among the visitors, and were 
now taking leave. I could not hear wdiat he 
said, as he gave a nosegay to each lady with 
his wonted old-fashioned gallantry ; but I might 
guess that it was " Sweets to the sweet." Then, 
as the carriage rolled through the gateway in 
the old wall, he turned tow^ard the house, re- 
peating some words which, from the half-chant- 
ing sound, I knew to be something from the 



1 6 Talk at a Country House 

Persian, which he was always fond of quoting 
to himself. Then we talked on. 

Foste?'. I like to hear the musical and melo- 
dious sound of Persian, though I do not under- 
stand the meaning. But were you taking leave 
of the ladies in Persian ? 

The Squire. Only a poet can translate poetry ; 
but come into the Great Parlor, and I will try 
to find you a better translation than my own 
would be of what I said. 

Foster. Why do you and your children call 
it the " Great Parlor," while other people call it 
the " library " ? 

The Squire. It is the old name ; perhaps 
given it by Bess of Hardwicke herself, when 
she built it, and the chapel over it, because she 
was not content with the *' little parlor," which 
was enough for the forefathers of her husband, 
St. Loe. Bookshelves have now taken the 
place of her oak paneling; but I fancy her 
still sitting in one of the deep window-seats, 
and looking up at her great coat of arms over 
the mantelpiece, impaled with that of her hus- 
band, and with more quarterings than I can re- 
member the names of. Now for the books. 

Foster. But you have not yet told me the 
name of the book you were quoting, nor its 
author. 

The Squire. It is the " Gulistan," or Rose 
Garden, of Sa'di. Many who have a far better 



Persian Poetry 17 



right than I to speak on the subject say that it is 
the greatest work of the greatest of the Persian 
poets. It has been translated into Latin, Eng- 
lish, German, French, and perhaps other lan- 
guages. There are at least four English trans- 
lations, which you will find on that shelf. 

Foster, A great witness to the worth of the 
original. How every man who has drunk deeply 
of Homer, Horace, or Dante tries to translate 
his favorite author, in order that others may 
share with him the enjoyment which, while it 
remains unshared, seems scarcely his own ! 

The Squire. Every one tries, and every one 
fails. The thought, the habit of mind, is as 
different in one country and one age from that 
of another as is the language ; and what genius 
is sufficient to reproduce the original thought 
in a wholly new form, and to express it in new 
words as exactly fitted to the thought as are 
those of the first writer ! The English Bible — 
not the Revised Version — is almost an excep- 
tion ; but then Hebrew thought has, through 
long ages, become the thought of Christendom, 
and is in a measure as English as English itself. 
Even so, it is wonderful that such a translation 
into such English should have been possible. 

Foster. You were to show me a translation 
of the passage which you were quoting from 
Sa'di : which am I to take ? 

The Squire. That of Eastwick is probably the 



Talk at a Country House 



most scholarly, and he represents the original 
alternations of prose and verse in a way which 
is often happy ; but I sometimes rather fancy 
the quaintness of Dumoulin. There it is. But 
if the subject interests you enough, you should 
read the whole of Sa'di's Introduction, or pre- 
face, which in this, as in his " Bustan," is to 
European taste, at least, the finest part of either 
book. But for the " Bustan " I must refer you 
to a translation of my own.^ And then, after all 
our disparagement of translations, if only you 
will, with Tennyson, spread the silken sail of 
infancy and call back your old visions of the 
Arabian Nights, I think you will be repaid for 
your trouble, though you do not find all that 
the readers of the original talk of. 

Foster. Meanwhile, Squire, will you give me 
an outline of the country you advise me to 
enter on ? 

The Squire. The " Bustan," or Garden, and 
the " Gulistan," or Rose Garden, have the same 
idea or motive, though there is great variety in 
the treatment. The Introduction to each opens 
with the praises of God, taking as it were for 
text the words with which the devout Mussul- 
man always begins to speak or write, " In the 
Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassion- 
ate." The outburst of beauty which clothes the 
earth in the season of spring, the gift of life and 

1 See Appendix. 



Persian Poetry 19 

articulate speech to man, the divine govern- 
ment of the world, the blessings of which are 
shared by the good and bad alike, — all these 
declare the wisdom, goodness, and greatness 
of the Creator, and call for thankfulness from 
man. Sa'di's piety, and the political genius 
which that piety inspires and informs, are very 
striking. He writes in a manner which reminds 
one of the spirit of Isaiah or of Milton. 

Explain it or leave it unexplained as you 
may, the fact cannot be denied of the contrast 
— the difference in kind between the religions 
of Greece antl Rome and the faith of Islam, and 
the likeness in kind between the latter and the 
Christian faith. And this was evidently the gen- 
uine and practical faith of Sa'di; he was emi- 
nently a religious man, believing in an actual 
relation between God and man. And the wreck 
and anarchy of nations which the Tartar devas- 
tation had caused around him, contrasted with 
the beneficent reign of such rulers as his own, 
directed all his thoughts and hopes to the be- 
lief in a constitutional government of the world, 
old and settled on the foundations of eternal 
law and justice and mercy, under a righteous 
king. The " Gulistan " opens with a description 
of springtime : the " Bustan " by setting forth 
the attributes of the Creator. From this praise 
of the Creator Sa'di goes on to speak of the 
Prophet; and then of the righteous rule of the 



20 Talk at a Country House 

Atabak, or sovereign, Aboo-Bakr, in whose 
reign he was writing. In a day when the pros- 
perity and happiness of a wliole people were 
always dependent on the character of a ruler, 
Sa'di is never weary of insisting on the duties 
of kings, justice, mercy, beneficence, and the 
maintenance of all these by a strong hand ; and 
while the former annals of Persia treat of many 
such kings, he declares that none of them was 
more worthy than Aboo-Bakr. Then, with the 
proud humility of a great man conscious of his 
genius, he says that lowly as he is in the pres- 
ence of his king, yet it is his verses — the 
pearls of poetry which he is stringing — which 
shall keep that king's memory alive in the com- 
ing ages. 

Foster. But, Squire, you have not told me 
what you said after speeding the ladies on their 
way. 

The Squire. You find me " as tedious as a 
king," though you have not Dogberry's appreci- 
ation of that virtue. But I was just coming to 
the point. Sa'di goes on, in the Introduction to 
each book, to give his reasons for writing it, in 
the form of an apologue. In the " Gulistan," 
he tells, in a charming idyl, how, when he had 
become a dervish, and was sitting in the corner 
of retirement and meditation, he was prevailed 
on, by the entreaties of an old friend, to spend 
the evening outside the city, in a garden spark- 



Persiafi Poetry 21 

ling and fragrant with flowers and cool with 
fountains. In the morning, when the desire 
to depart had overcome the wish to stay, Sa'di's 
friend gathered a nosegay of roses, hyacinths, 
and sweet basil for him to take, but threw them 
down when the poet, reminding him that such 
flowers must soon fade and die, promised to 
write him a book which should live. And on 
the same day he began the "Gulistan." 

Foster, Then the ladies should have thrown 
away your roses while you made your speech 
in Persian. But what is the corresponding 
apologue ? 

The Squire. In the " Bustan," Sa'di describes 
himself as spending his days with men of every 
kind, in every corner of the world, and gather- 
ing some treasure from every store, and some 
ears of corn from every harvest. But he found 
no people like those of Shiraz, his native city. 
He could not leave such a people empty- 
handed, and he resolved to write a book in 
their honor and memory ; to build a palace of 
art and education, of which the ten gates, or 
chapters, should be Justice and Judgment ; 
Beneficence, by which man may show the like- 
ness of God ; Love, not earthly, but divine ; 
Humility ; Resignation ; Contentment ; Edu- 
cation ; Thankfulness ; Repentance and Right- 
eousness ; and lastly. Prayer. 

Poster. Are not the Atabaks, as you call 



2 2 Talk at a Country House 

them, the Atabegs, as the name used to be 
written before the invention of the scientific 
method of spelling Oriental words by help of a 
key ? If I remember rightly, it is a Turkish 
word, meaning " Protector of the Prince," and 
was an official title. 

The Squire. Yes ; and on the break-up of the 
Seljuk dynasty, in the twelfth century of our 
era, like mayors of the palace and other such 
ministers in old times and places, they sup- 
planted their sovereigns, and founded dynasties 
of their own. There were four such dynasties 
in Persia, of which that of Aboo-Bakr was one. 
His capital was Shiraz ; and though the Turks 
and Tartars destroyed the civilization and cul- 
ture of the West, they roused to new activity 
the letters and science which the Arabs had 
carried into Persia, and those adjoining coun- 
tries in which Persian was the language of 
the court and of literature. After allovving for 
the flights of Oriental imagination on the one 
hand, and for the shortcomings of a transla- 
tion on the other, even the English reader can 
see that Sa'di's thoughts and words of God 
and of man, of nature and of civil government, 
betoken a high degree of culture and refine- 
ment, and the practice of wise, just, and right- 
eous government by the kings ; and those who 
know the original agree that for happiness and 
beauty of imagery and language it may com- 



Persia7i Poetry 23 



pare with the poetry of other nations, while in 
depth of pathos it far surpasses that of Greece 
or Rome. Persian poetry draws its main spirit 
from Hebrew and early Christian sources, 
though through the channel of Muhammedan- 
ism ; and we may say that it rises above or falls 
below the classical standards much as these do. 

Foster. What else did Sa'di WTite ? 

The Squire. The list of his works is long, but 
his " Diwan," or Collection of Songs of Mystical 
Piety, has been overshadowed by that of Hafiz ; 
and the works by which he is chiefly known 
are those of which we have already spoken. 

Foster. What is known of Sa'di himself 1 

The Squire. He mentions in several places 
incidents in his own life ; and these were put to- 
gether, with the addition of some traditions, by 
a Persian writer, two hundred years later. He 
is said to have spent thirty years in study, thirty 
in traveling in distant lands, and thirty in re- 
tirement as a dervish. He was taken prisoner 
by the crusaders while practicing austerities in 
the desert, and made to work on the fortifica- 
tions of Tripoli ; and he was redeemed by an 
old friend, whose daughter he afterwards mar- 
ried. She was a Persian Xanthippe, and when 
she cast in his teeth that her father had bought 
him for ten dinars, he replied that he had sold 
himself again for one hundred, the amount of 
her dowry. But, so far as I know, the fullest 



24 Talk at a Country House 

account of Sa'di is to be found in the introduc- 
tion to Harrington's edition of the works of 
Sa'di (Sadee, he calls him), published in Cal- 
cutta in 1 79 1. 

(Here our talk ended, for that morning. But 
we returned to the subject some days later ; 
and I now give the substance of the conversa- 
tion which then followed between the Squire 
and myself.) 

Foster. Since our talk the other day about 
Persian poetry, I have been looking into the 
books you pointed out to me, and into the 
translations of Omar Khayyam by Fitzgerald, 
Whinfield, and McCarthy, and of Hafiz by 
Reviski, Bicknell, and Clarke. 

The Squire. Omar, the skeptic and mathema- 
tician, in the century before, and Hafiz, the 
religious mystic, in the century after, that of 
Sa'di, the political philosopher and theologian. 
And, to use a favorite Persian metaphor, all 
these pearls of poesy are strung on the chro- 
nological tables of Malcolm's " History of Per- 
sia ; " though he hardly mentions these or any 
other of the great Persian poets. But have 
you found any new clues to the philosophy of 
history, either with or without the help of our 
Anglo-Persian Dryasdusts t 

Foster. You always laugh at my philosophy 
of history ; but if philosophy is the search for 
wisdom, and if reason is ratio, or the relation 



Persian Poetry 2$ 



of things to one another, why should it be 
unreasonable to seek for the relations of the 
facts of history ? 

T/ie Squire. Not at all unreasonable to seek 
what yet it may be impossible to find. Bacon 
says that all facts are governed by laws, and that 
these laws are ideas in the mind of God ; but 
then another authority, not less than Bacon, 
says, " His ways are past finding out." It is a 
grand and glorious moment in a young man's life 
when, after years of toiling up the schoolboy's 
hill of facts, he reaches a point at which the 
scene of history as one great whole bursts on 
his astonished view. I do not forget the delight 
with which I first read Arnold's account of 
Vico's comparison of the history of a nation 
with the life of a man, with its three stages of 
childhood, manhood, and old age ; or again of 
Comte's three historical periods, the theologi- 
cal, the metaphysical, and the positive, which 
John Mill held to throw such a clear light upon 
all history. But though the facts remain, the 
splendors of the fancy which surrounded them 
fade into the light of common day, and we find 
that in great part, at least, we have been like 
the astronomers who thought they were making 
scientific observations of the parallax, only to 
find that they had been measuring the error of 
their instruments. These visionary forms, these 
/do/a SpecCis^ are not to be worshiped, but to 



26 Talk at a Country House 

be strictly questioned, in order to know whether 
there is any reahty in them. 

Foster. You do think, then, that there is 
some reahty in them ? 

The Squire. Yes ; the universe of history, as 
of everything else, has no doubt coherent laws ; 
but they require for their comprehension a 
mind not less infinite than the universe itself. 
I am reminded of the so-called Oriental tale of 
the alchemist, who shows his disciple the uni- 
versal solvent, which he has spent a lifetime in 
obtaining, lying in a crucible ; and the disciple 
says, " O Sage, be not deceived ; how can that 
which is to dissolve all things be itself con- 
tained in a ladle ! " Youth is the proper sea- 
son for these finite ideals of life, and he who 
knows the delight of them will desire that every 
one should enjoy that season. But he is not 
the less to be pitied to whom the experience of 
age has not taught, as it taught Sir Isaac New- 
ton, that we are but children on the shore, pick- 
ing up here and there a pretty stone or shell, 
while the great ocean of truth rolls its unex- 
plored waters before us. 

Foster. But the shells and the pebbles are 
actual, and really rolled in by the sea. 

The Squire. True. And if you will tell me 
what you have now been picking up on the 
beach of Persian history, I shall listen with 
profit as well as pleasure. 



Persian Poetry 27 



Foster. I am a seeker, if not a finder, and I 
will content myself with stating some questions 
which have occurred to me on this subject. If 
they have a somewhat theological coloring, I 
may plead that if Gibbon the skeptic classed 
himself with the philosophers who held all re- 
ligions to be equally false, Gibbon the historian 
recognized the important part which religion 
always plays in the history of nations. So I 
ask myself. Was there a relation between the 
greatness of the Persians, from the days of 
Cyrus through so many ages, and the national 
faith in a God of light and goodness, of which 
the sun was the fitting symbol, contending 
with the spirit of darkness and evil ? Did some 
defect or degeneracy of their faith cause, as 
well as accompany, the break-up of the Per- 
sian empire at the end of the Sassanian dy- 
nasty ? When the Arab conquest established 
the rule of the Caliphs on the ruins of the 
house of Sassan, and superseded the faith of 
Zoroaster by that of Muhammed, was this made 
possible, and even easy, because the proclama- 
tion of an absolute and irresistible Will was 
itself irresistible while its proclaimers heartily 
believed it ? When the warlike and religious 
fervor of the new faith had cooled, was the 
skepticism of Omar Khayyam an instance, or 
only an accident, of the change ? Did his 
learned studies at Nishapur in mathematics, 



28 Talk at a Country House 

astronomy, and logic, joined with the recogni- 
tion of the facts of other religions than their 
own, make men skeptics, not only in religion, 
but in politics ? If so, how could men with 
such a creed as Omar's resist the Tartar in- 
vaders, those extraordinary savages, whose 
utter cruelty of nature was again and again 
transformed into gentleness and political wis- 
dom by their hearty adoption of the faith in 
God and his Prophet which its first promul- 
gators had almost lost ? Was not Sa'di one, 
and probably the greatest, of the literary and 
philosophical teachers of age after age of kings 
and their subjects, of which teaching the ripest 
fruits were seen in the reigns of the great 
Mogul sovereigns of Agra and Delhi ? 

The Squire. I remember a discussion, some 
fifty years ago, in this very room, between 
Mountstuart Elphinstone and the old Bengal 
civilian who then lived here. The latter asked 
how it was that while the civilization of India 
in the days of Akbar was in many respects 
superior (as he held) to that of England in the 
days of Elizabeth, Akbar's contemporary, the 
one had been continually advancing ever since, 
while the other had dwindled almost to nothing. 
I ventured to suggest that the difference was the 
difference between Christianity and Muham- 
medanism, and Elphinstone said he thought 
so, too. But what of Hafiz, whom you just 
now named with Omar and Sa'di ? 



Persian Poetry 29 



Foster. I would rather hear about him from 
you. I am certainly out of my depth there. 

The Squire. So am I ; and so was Hafiz 
himself, as he is continually telling us. But 
what would you specially like to know ? 

Foster. Something of the poet, and some- 
thing of the religious mystic, if such he was. 

The Squire. The " Diwan," or Collection of 
the Odes of Hafiz, is a great book of songs 
arranged alphabetically, that is to say that the 
successive letters of the alphabet end the 
rhymes of successive sets of songs. These 
rhymes follow a different method from our own, 
or those of other European languages, there 
being only one rhyme, and that a double end- 
ing, for all the verses of each ode, though the 
words which supply all these rhymes are differ- 
ent from one another, as with us. The Persian 
metres, too, are more stately than our own, the 
proportion of long to short syllables, as I think, 
being much greater in that language than in 
ours. The words of the odes of Hafiz are 
most musical, and the thoughts and images to 
which they are wedded do not fall short of any 
standard of lyric poetry which we may supply : 
they are " simple, sensuous, and passionate " 
in the sense of Milton, and are successful at- 
tempts to make man's life harmonious in the 
sense of Carlyle. You will hardly think so 
from any of the translations you have found 



30 Talk at a Country House 

in the library. I fancy our best chance would 
be if we should ever have a translator like 
Omar's Fitzgerald, who knows how to para- 
phrase when a literal version is impossible. 
Failing something better, here is an attempt 
of my own at such a version of his first 
ode : — 

Bring out the wine, Cupbearer ! Ho ! 

Pour out, and high tlie goblet fill ; 
For though at first love smooth did flow, 

Its course is crossed and troubled still. 

The zephyrs fragrance round us fling, 

As through the Loved One's hair they play ; 

But for that fragrance which they bring 
Our heart's blood is the price we pay. 

Spill wine upon the carpet spread 

For prayer, should so the Teacher say ; 

For he by whom the march is led 

Must know the customs of the way. 

There are who say that on this earth 

A halting-place may still be found, — 

A halting-place for rest and mirth. 

For those upon life's journey bound. 

But what of rest or mirth can tell 

To me, who ever and anon 
Hear from each camel's tinkling bell, 

*' Load up ; the caravan goes on " ? 

The night is dark ; the waves strike fear : 
The whirling waters how they roar ! 

Our lot how should they know who bear 
Their own light loads along the shore ? 



Persian Poetry 31 



Now all my work in vain has been : 
Self-seeking cannot come to good ; 

The soul must tind that good within, 
Not with the worldly multitude. 

Hafiz, the Presence wouldst thou see, 

No moment's absence must thou know; 

When The Beloved hath met with thee. 
Give up the world, and let it go. 

These verses may give you but little proof 
of what I say ; but if you knew the original as 
you do your Horace and Lucretius, you would 
agree with me that not only for pathos, but for 
singular felicity of expression, too, the warning 
sound of the camel's bell may be compared 
with the '''' 07?iiies eodem cogimur'^ of Horace, and 
the contrast between the stormy sea and safe 
shore with the " stmve mart mag7io " of Lucre- 
tius. 

Foster. I will take your comparison on trust, 
till I get that opportunity of leisure and the 
inclination to avail myself of it which the witty 
author of " The Miseries of Human Life " says 
it is so impossible to find. Meanwhile, let me 
cap your Hafiz with a quotation from Sa'di 
which caught my eye in turning over the pages 
of Malcolm. Here it is : — 

" Alas for him who is gone and has done no good deed ! 
The trumpet of march has sounded, and his load is not bound 
on." 

The Squi?'e. The beauty of the image is 



32 Talk at a Country House 

brought out by the variations ; and the stern- 
ness of the duty-loving Sa'di contrasts with the 
gentle egotism of Hafiz. You may add another 
parallel from the hopeless gloom of Omar, 
which in Fitzgerald's version runs thus : — 

"'T is but a tent, where takes his one day's rest 
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest ; 
The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash 
Strikes and prepares it for another Guest," 

Foster. If this ode is a fair specimen of the 
songs of Hafiz, it would seem easy to maintain 
the mystical interpretation of his poetry. While 
you were reciting it, I thought of one of Ma- 
dame Guion's hymns. I forget the French, but 
Cowper has translated it. 

" While place we seek or place we shun, 
The soul finds happiness in none ; 
But with a God to lead the way 
'T is equal joy to go or stay." 

The Squire. You may find many such paral- 
lels between the odes of Hafiz and the hymns 
of Madame Guion and other Christian mystics. 
I once saw a letter to his friend from a young 
Anglo-Indian, one of whom had turned, in ill- 
ness, from the poetry of Sa'di and Hafiz to the 
faith of Madame Guion and William Law, and 
illustrated the doctrine of the Christian mystics 
by a string of quotations from the Persian 
poets. And it is related of Sir Gore Ouseley, 
a great lover of Persian poetry, who was Eng- 



Persian Poetry 33 



lish ambassador to the Persian court early in 
this century, that when he was dying, long 
years after, he prayed in Persian. But I must 
confess that I have softened, and even con- 
cealed, the original by the word " Teacher," in 
the third stanza of this ode. It is, literally, 
" the chief of the Magians or infidel Fire-Wor- 
shipers," and this, again, is said to mean the 
keeper of the wine-shop ; and I have given 
the Sufi interpretation of the name, which is 
that it signifies the spiritual teacher and guide 
of man through the hindrances of his earthly 
life which beset his entrance into the presence 
of God. 

Foster. Can you give me a more precise ac- 
count of these Sufis, and of the position of 
Hafiz among them ? 

The Squire, " I know when you do not ask 
me," as St. Augustine said of time. The facts 
are obscure, from their number and vastness ; 
but I will tell you what little I know. With 
many differences, there is much likeness among 
the Hebrew prophets, the Christian monks, the 
Muhammedan dervishes, and the Buddhists of 
India. In times of religious fervor and earnest- 
ness, they have all more or less made good 
their claims to be men sent from God ; in after 
days of national degeneracy, they have sunk 
into sensuality and hypocrisy, followed by 
more or less successful efforts at reformation. 



34 Talk at a Country House 

Though the Koran does not approve of mo- 
nasticism, and offers to the true believer mainly 
the enjoyments of sense which come of fight- 
ing and of conquest, still there is a praise of 
poverty and simplicity of life, and of absolute 
prostration before the Divine Majesty, which 
may have easily combined with the desire for 
religious contemplation and for final absorp- 
tion into God which came from the farther 
East. And thence came the several orders of 
dervishes in the Muhammedan tribes. When 
the national life of Persia was roused to new 
forms of energy by the successive invasions of 
Arabs and Tartars, there were lovers of their 
country, of whom Sa'di was the greatest ex- 
ample, who were the teachers of kings and 
statesmen and people, and recluses vowed to 
philosophy, poetry, and religious faith. The 
right place for such men seemed to them to be 
in the ranks of the dervishes, who were re- 
spected by the haughtiest kings, as the Chris- 
tian monks were by our fierce princes in the 
Middle Ages. The Sufis were, as I understand 
it, ascetic and contemplation-loving reformers 
among the dervishes. Sufi means " wool," and 
the Sufis were so called because, like Shake- 
speare's Don Adriano de Armado, they " went 
woolward for penance." Sa'di was a Sufi. So 
was Hafiz, though he denounces the hypocrisy 
of the sect. 



Persian Poetry 35 



Foster. This seems to me in favor of the 
religious interpretation of the songs of Hafiz. 
For how or why should he charge his brother 
dervishes with hypocrisy, if he himself was 
habitually practicing the same vice, and cloak- 
ing the mere love of sensual pleasures in lan- 
guage which the Sufis declared to be that of 
spiritual and religious devotion and ecstasy ? 
Yet, after all, does not the sensuality seem 
as real as the spirituality, and is there any 
reconciliation or explanation of the contradic- 
tion ? 

The Squire. The contradiction is great and 
puzzling. The question was raised at the burial 
of Hafiz, when the rites of an orthodox Mu- 
hammedan were refused him till an augury 
had been taken (as the practice still is) from a 
verse of one of his odes, opened at hazard, and 
the words were found : — 

" Turn not away from the bier of Hafiz, 

For, though immersed in sin, he may yet be admitted into 
Paradise." 

The dispute still continues, here no less than 
in Persia, and is settled by every man in ac- 
cordance with his own taste or sentiment and 
estimate of the life of man. But perhaps some 
light may be thrown on it by the analogies in 
the schools of Greece and the Christian Church. 
The Socrates of the " Phaedrus " and the " Sym- 
posium " is the very counterpart of the Sa'di of 



36 Talk at a Country House 

the " Gulistan " and " Bustan " ; except that the 
Persian believes in a personal relation between 
man and his wise and beneficent Creator, a 
belief not attributed to the Greek philosopher. 
The Christian Church has always accepted an 
interpretation of the Song of Solomon which 
very closely resembles that which the Sufis 
give of their songs of love and wine. I know 
but little of the religious mysticism of the Mid- 
dle Ages, but I believe there is much of it of 
w^hich the language, though not so sensual as 
that of the Muhammedan Sufis, can only be 
justified by interpreting as they do the enforced 
asceticism and celibacy of the cloister, which, 
while maintained by faith and prayer, would 
give the intensity of suppressed earthly pas- 
sions to the language of religious worship, and 
especially in the adoration of the Virgin and 
the saints. Then we know how these religious 
fervors of devotion have often degenerated into 
mere sensuality and hypocrisy, in sects and in 
individuals. If we remember that the odes of 
Hafiz probably spread over some fifty or sixty 
years of his life, it may not be thought unrea- 
sonable to conjecture that they express very 
various experiences and sentiments of his ac- 
tual life. We read of his rivalry in love with 
the prince of Shiraz, of his wife and his son, 
and of his secluded and religious life as a der- 
vish. Some have thought that traces of skep- 



Persian Poetry 37 



ticism at some period of his life may be found 
in his writings. The lovers of the higher criti- 
cism think that if we had the dates of the odes 
some further light might be thrown on the sub- 
ject. But the chronological has been irrevocably 
merged in the alphabetical order ; there is no 
evidence of what the actual life of Hafiz was 
at all or any periods of it ; and we must be 
content to remain ignorant, unless we prefer 
the cloudland of conjecture. 

Foster. Old Indians in the present day do 
not read and repeat Persian poetry as they did 
in the generation of which I suppose we may 
take Mountstuart Elphinstone as the represen- 
tative ? 

The Squire. No ; a great change was brought 
about in this respect by Lord Auckland's abo- 
lition of the use of Persian as the official lan- 
guage in all but diplomatic business. 

Foster. How was that "i 

The Squire. Under the Mogul sovereigns, 
Persian was the language not only of the court, 
but of all government business, political, fiscal, 
and judicial. 

Foster. Something, I suppose, like the use 
of Norman-French in England after the Con- 
quest ; with Arabic, like our Latin, in the back- 
ground, for the church and law ? And how 
does Hindustani come in 1 

The Squire, Hindustani, called in Persian 



38 Talk at a Country House 

Urdu, or " the camp," in distinction from the 
court, and the word from which we derive our 
*' horde," — this is the Hindi, or vernacular of 
Hind, amphfied by the introduction of Persian 
and Arabic words, though retaining the Hindi 
grammatical forms, becoming thus a I'mgua 
franca for popular use beyond its proper limits. 
With the other institutions of the Moguls we 
took over the use of Persian in all official busi- 
ness, and the Munshi, or Persian secretary and 
interpreter, became a part of the staff of the 
English official in charge of political, revenue, 
and judicial business. The language of busi- 
ness was soon discovered to be the language 
of a new and fine literature ; and the volumes 
on those shelves illustrate the enthusiasm which 
the magistrates, judges, and collectors in our 
older provinces, and our administrators in those 
newly annexed, our political agents and resi- 
dents in the native courts, and our military 
officers threw into these studies from the time 
when Warren Hastings set the example. But 
then a generation of .speculative reformers 
arose, who asked why we should not act in the 
spirit of the Moguls, and, instead of carrying on 
their method with literal servility, make English 
the official language, and so bring the several 
nations of India into a new and more intimate 
connection with our own literature and civiliza- 
tion. A retired Bengal judge expressed the 



Persian Poetry 39 



general opinion of practical men when he said 
that you might as well make Sanskrit the official 
language in the courts of Westminster as Eng- 
lish in the administration of justice in India. 
He, indeed, though a man of ability and emi- 
nence in the company's service, could see no 
inconvenience in the employment of Persian in 
the administration of justice; and such is the 
force of habit that when he had occasion to 
take notes of an important trial at the Somer- 
setshire assizes, he actually wrote them in Per- 
sian rather than in the English words in which 
the evidence was given, just as he had done, 
many years before, when trying dakoits at 
Jessore. But though the general opinion of 
the native as well as the English officials was 
against any change, Lord Auckland, by the 
advice of Sir Charles Metcalfe, took what prob- 
ably now seems to every one the obviously 
reasonable course, and by his orders in 1837, 
finally confirmed in 1838 by the home govern- 
ment, all official business was to be carried on 
in the vernacular languages of the country. 
Persian remained, and remains, the language 
of diplomacy. It is not required in any other 
branch of the public service ; and it is not pos- 
sible that men so hard-worked as our Indian 
civilians and soldiers now are should find time 
and energy for a purely literary study. They 
all fall back on their Homer and Horace ; or, 



4© Talk at a Country House 

yet better, on their Shakespeare and Tennyson. 
But enough of this ; you are, no doubt, already 
silently quoting Horace against me, and repeat- 
ing to yourself: — 

" Persicos odi, puer, apparatus : 
Displicent nexae philyra coronse." 



III. 



THE OLD HALL AND THE PORTRAITS. 

There stately dame and merr>- maid, 

And Knight with \-isage stem, 
By limner's cunning art portrayed. 

Their eyes did on him turn. 

Old Song. 

As we opened the porch door, on coming 
back from a walk, we heard the sound of music. 
The children were dancing in the hall, — the 
squire's grandchildren, — led by their young 
aunt, not many years older than the eldest of 
them, while their mother played the piano. 
The hall still kept the main features of the old 
manor place which Leland had visited. Along 
the minstrel's gallery were hung breastplate, 
steel cap, sword, and other pieces of armor, 
— not, indeed, of Henry VIII, 's time, but of 
that of the Commonwealth, The dais was now 
level with the rest of the floor, and the bay 
window had become a porch ; but the squint 
through which the lord could look into the hall, 
after he had withdrawn to the solar or parlor, 
might still be seen, though closed by the panel- 
ing on the other side, supposed to be the work 



42 Talk at a Country House 

of Building Bess ; and the lines of a huge 
Tudor arch showed where the old fireplace had 
been. The walls were hung with portraits 
within a range of nearly three hundred years, 
as the Squire had informed me. There was a 
solemn brightness in his look as he watched the 
dancers, and then glanced round the walls ; and 
he remarked, half to himself, " This makes an 
old man feel young ; or indeed, not so much 
young as undying, while the past and the future 
are centred in the present, in one common life." 

Foster, How many generations are there 
now here ? 

The Squire. Living, there are, as you see, 
three, including myself ; in portraits of our 
family, seven more. That small portrait on 
panel, of William, Earl of Pembroke, Shake- 
speare's W. H., is perhaps rather earlier. 

Foster. How does it come here .'* 

The Squire. There was some link of friend- 
ship between the Herbert family and that man 
in Puritan bands and cloak, who was again con- 
nected with us. 

Foster. I see the Puritan, and also a Cav- 
alier with lace and velvet and flowing locks, 
while each has by his side a lady, the two being 
'sisters, apparently. 

The Squire. He was no Cavalier, in spite of 
his dress, which indeed, as you know, was not 
peculiar to the Cavaliers even in Charles I.'s 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 43 

days. He is John Strachey, the friend to whom 
Locke writes from Holland with expressions of 
affection, and the prospect of talking over many 
things in " the parlour at Sutton." He died 
young, but the letters between the friends, 
which are still extant, show him to have been 
as enlightened as Locke himself. And I like 
to fancy that the armor still hanging there may 
have been worn by his father, who was serving 
with Locke's father in the regiment of Popham, 
their near neighbor in those parts. Strachey's 
grandfather framed, or helped to frame, the laws 
of the then newly settled colony of Virginia ; 
wrote verses prefixed to Ben Jonson's " Seja- 
nus ; " and his account of the shipwreck of Sir 
George Summers, with whom he was at Ber- 
muda, suggested some of the incidents of 
Shakespeare's "Tempest," taken either from 
his narrative, or, as the learned Mr. Furness 
thinks probable, from his own lips. The la- 
dies are the great-granddaughters of Thomas 
Hodges, whose monument in the parish church 
of Wedmore, famous for King Alfred's treaty 
with the Danes, tells how he, " at the seige of 
Antwerpe, about 1583, with unconquered cour- 
age, wonne two ensigns from the enemy, where, 
receiving his last wound, he gave three lega- 
cies : his soule to his Lord Jesus ; his body to 
be lodged in Flemish earth ; his heart to be 
sent to his dear wife in England." 



44 Talk at a CouTitry House 

" Here lies his wounded heart, for whome 
One kingdom was too small a roome ; 
Two kingdoms, therefore, have thought good to part 
So stout a body and so brave a heart." 

The old ladies with prayer-books are the mo- 
ther and the grandmother of the young ladies 
and of their husbands. And there, too, is 
one whose name we know, but nothing more, 
except that she died unmarried, while her por- 
trait shows a true lover's knot, and a ring hung 
round her neck. If the story was one of disap- 
pointment and sadness, let us hope that there 
were peace and contentment in the end. 

Foster, Did you keep up your connection 
with Virginia ? 

The Squire. Yes. Two migrations are re- 
corded in the family pedigree. And though the 
male line has ended, I still correspond with a 
worthy representative through the female line. 
This gentleman opened a communication with 
me after the war of 1861-65, in the troubles 
of which he had lost his family pedigree, and 
asked me to help him to supply its place ; and 
in token of .his claim he sent me photographs 
of the pictures of several of our common an- 
cestors, of which the counterparts are now 
hanging before you. I have, too, a farther 
connection with America, in which a literary 
correspondence has ripened into warm per- 
sonal friendship. 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 



45 



Foster. I remember the name of Henry 
Strachey in Mahon's " History of England " 
and Bancroft's " History of the United States," 
and in a publication of the New York Histor- 
ical Society, called " The Treason of General 
Lee." Who was this Henry Strachey? 

The Squire. There is his portrait, — a good 
one, by Northcote. When Lord Howe and 
Admiral Howe were sent out to put down the 
American patriots, Henry Strachey was sent 
with them as secretary to the commission. Gen- 
eral Lee, a soldier of fortune, was the next in 
command under Washington, having so great a 
reputation that there had been some thought of 
giving the first command to him instead of to 
Washington. He was surprised and taken by 
Colonel Harcourt, and during his imprisonment 
proposed a scheme to the English commis- 
sioners for bringing back the country into com- 
plete submission to England, which Mr. Moore 
justly calls by the name of "treason." Al- 
though many important papers relating to 
American independence have been carried off 
from this house, we have still a large number 
of interesting documents connected with the 
period, as also with the negotiations for peace 
in 1782, the calendars of which fill several 
pages of the appendix to the sixth report of the 
Historical MSS. Commission of 1877. It was 
the same Strachey who negotiated the Peace 



46 Talk at a Coimtry House 

of Versailles, which recognized the indepen- 
dence of the United States. I have papers of 
his, from the secret instructions of Lord Shel- 
burne to the bills for post horses between 
Calais and Paris. 

Foster. Why did Lord Shelburne send an- 
other envoy, when Oswald was already repre- 
senting the British government in the negotia- 
tions ? 

The Squire. He had been instructed by Fox ; 
and after Fox had retired from the ministry, 
on the death of Lord Rockingham, vShelburne, 
now become prime minister, sent Strachey to 
strengthen the hands of Oswald, whom he 
thought hardly a match for Franklin, Gay, and 
Adams, and who, in his anxiety for peace, 
" went before " the American commissioners, 
as Lord Shelburne expressed it. We have a 
story that Oswald had his papers ransacked 
while he was at the opera, and that Strachey, 
to avoid such a risk, always carried his in his 
pocket. In the archives at Washington there 
is a once secret diary of John Adams during 
these negotiations, in which he says, " Strachey 
is as artful and insinuating a man as they could 
possibly send ; he pushes and presses every 
point as far it can possibly go ; he has a most 
eager, earnest, pointed spirit." But the rivalry 
or hostility between Fox and Shelburne may 
have had somethins: to do with the double 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 47 

negotiations. Fox was ready to give Shelburne 
the character portrayed in the caricature of the 
" Rolliad : " — 

" A noble Duke affirms, I like his plan : 
I never did, my lords, I never can ; 
Shame on the slanderous breath which dares instill 
That I, who now condemn, advised the ill. 
Plain words, thank Heaven, are always understood. 
' I could approve,' I said, but not ' I would.' 
Anxious to make the noble Duke content, 
My view was just to seem to give consent. 
While all the world might see that nothing less was meant.'* 

We have a tradition that when Lord Shelburne 
was forming his ministry. Fox met Strachey 
one Sunday afternoon in Hay Hill, and asked 
him what he expected for himself, he being 
then Secretary of the Treasury. On his re- 
plying, " Lord Shelburne says I am to keep my 
office," Fox rejoined, " Then, by God, you 're 
out." But Fox was wrong, for Shelburne 
made Strachey an Under-Secretary of State, 
and sent him, as I have said, to carry forward 
the Versailles negotiations. 

Foster. Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice, in his 
" Life of Lord Shelburne," has clearly shown, 
and history now recognizes, that Shelburne's 
uncertain political action was not dishonesty, 
but a Hamlet-like habit of looking too much 
at all sides of every question. It would be 
harder to justify Fox's coalition with Lord 
North. But was not this Strachey also the 



48 Talk at a Country House 

Indian secretary of Clive, whose fine portrait 
by Dance you have here, and that seems to me 
to be the original, of which I think there is 
more than one replica? I remember that 
Clive, in his defense before the House of Com- 
mons, said that, of the many services which 
George Grenville had done him, none was 
greater than that of recommending Henry 
Strachey to him. 

The Squire. Yes. And Dance's portrait cor- 
responds with what we otherwise know of Clive. 
He was coarse, unscrupulous, intolerant of 
opposition, and, I think we must say, some- 
what rapacious, though he himself " wondered 
at his own moderation " when he looked back 
on the treasures of Moorshedabad, of which 
he did not appropriate the whole. But he was 
also of political as well as military genius ; and 
he did not hesitate to set public above private 
interests, as when he declared war against the 
Dutch in India, at a moment in which they 
held the bills which represented his whole for- 
tune ; and he was capable of warm and faithful 
friendship. He was a sort of Bismarck. 

Foster. What a number of false accounts 
of his death there have been, from the con- 
temporary letters of Horace Walpole and the 
sayings of Dr. Johnson down to '' Notes and 
Queries," only a year or two ago, which I think 
you have more than once written to set right ! 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 49 

The Squire. I took down my account from 
the mouth of the late Sir Henry Strachey, who 
had it from his mother, who was in the house 
at the time. Clive suffered, till he would 
endure it no longer, from a painful disease, of 
which he says, in a letter which I have : '• How 
miserable is my condition ! I have a disease 
which makes life intolerable, but which my 
doctors tell me will not shorten it one hour." 

Foster. You spoke of Clive's political gen- 
ius ; you attribute to him the foundation of 
our Indian empire, the expansion of which has 
been equaled by its stability, — a stability 
which could, at the end of a hundred years, 
stand such a test as the mutiny of 1857. 

The Squire. After Clive had defeated Su- 
raj-00-Dowlah, and set up Meer Jaffier in his 
place, he left the East India Company's factory 
at Calcutta to carry on their trade, as before, 
under a native, though now not only friendly 
but subservient prince. But the sudden acqui- 
sition of such enormous wealth by Clive and 
his colleagues in that war had excited a mad 
lust for a like acquisition of wealth by the 
company's servants left by Clive in the man- 
agement of the Bengal factory. The East 
India Company in Leadenhall Street allowed 
each of its servants in Bengal to carry on some 
private trading for himself, and now, in de- 
fiance of the opposition of the governor. Van- 



go Talk at a Country House 

sittart, who was, if I remember rightly, sup- 
ported by no one but young Warren Hastings, 
they converted this private trade into a system 
of mere extortion and robbery of the Nawab 
and his subjects. Meer Jaffier was superseded 
by Cossim Ali, whom they hoped to make a 
more subservient tool ; but he, too, after efforts 
at conciliation which it is quite pathetic to read 
of, was obliged to make a stand for the rights 
of his people. War began, and the directors 
at home, alarmed at the danger of a return to 
a state of things like that from which Clive's 
victory at Plassey had saved them, sent him 
out again, in 1765, to restore order. He re- 
instated Meer Jafher in the Nawabship; but 
he saw that the relations of the company to 
the native rulers of Bengal had become so 
changed that they could no longer be merely 
those of merchants trading in a foreign country, 
but must of necessity give those merchants a 
share in the political government of that coun- 
try. Under the Mogul sovereigns, the diwan, 
or collector of the revenues, shared some 
branches of the civil government of the prov- 
ince with the Nawab, and Clive, by obtaining 
from the Mogul emperor the office of diwan 
for the company, made that beginning of polit- 
ical responsibilities, as well as rights, which 
was to lay the foundations of our future empire 
in India. 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 5 1 

Foster. What were the next stages of the 
structure raised on this foundation ? 

The Squire. The Mogul empire was in ruins. 
It is always best to keep old forms as far as 
possible, and to make the new life seem at 
least to grow out of them, though it can no 
longer be infused into them. It is our English 
way, and Clive took it when he obtained the 
diwanee from the sovereign who had still the 
nominal right to grant it. But the government 
by the Nawab, of which it was the complement, 
had become little more than a sham ; and, under 
Warren Hastings, this, too, was absorbed into 
the English rule in Bengal, because Hastings 
found that in no other way was any tolerable 
administration of justice possible. But there 
was no resting here. As the once strong em- 
pire of the Moguls fell to pieces, the general 
anarchy gave opportunity for the rise of that 
terrible race of conquerors and plunderers, the 
Mahrattas. Hastings saw that the British 
territory must be overrun, and perhaps swal- 
lowed up in its turn, by these locusts, if no 
adequate defense were provided, and he re- 
sorted to the alliance with the Nawab of Oude 
which led to the Rohilla war, which he held to 
be defensible in honor and justice no less than 
by expediency. His object was to interpose a 
strong native state between the Mahrattas and 
the British province. If the Rohilla chiefs had 



52 Talk at a Country House 

been faithful to their treaty with Oude, Hast- 
ings would have supported their alliance ; but 
when the Rohillas opened their country to the 
Mahrattas for the invasion of Oude, which must 
have been followed by that of Bengal, he held 
himself called on by expediency, while not for- 
bidden by good faith and honor, to give the 
Nawab of Oude effectual support in the con- 
quest of the Rohillas, who in fact had no right 
but that of recent conquest. 

Foster. After the complete vindication of 
Hastings by Sir James Stephen and Sir John 
Strachey from the charges brought against him, 
they can hardly be renewed by any future his- 
torian ; but it is very difficult to understand 
how those charges could have been made by 
Burke, more or less sanctioned by Pitt, and 
adopted as true history by Mill and Macaulay. 

The Squire. It is difficult. They had before 
them all the evidence that we have now, if they 
chose to examine it ; and not one of them, 
whether as statesman or historian, had any 
right to make and maintain such charges with- 
out such examination. It seems to me no 
justification, nor even excuse for Burke, to say 
that he was carried away by his hatred of in- 
justice and oppression, and sympathy with the 
oppressed, and that he thus became the victim 
of the malignity of Francis, and of his own 
imagination and rhetoric. Such excuses may 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 53 

serve an ill-informed private person, but not a 
great statesman and leader of men. The same 
may be said of Pitt, if he believed the charges, 
as he said ; while still more unworthy of him 
are the suggestions that he was willing to let 
the opposition waste their energies on such a 
subject, and that he was jealous of the favor 
which Hastings received from the king and the 
chancellor. James Mill I knew, and his treat- 
ment of Hastings, though fatal to the character 
of an accurate and impartial historian, is less 
hard to explain. His disposition was, like that 
of Francis, malignant. Coulson asked Pea- 
cock of him, " Will he like what I like, and 
hate what I hate ? " and Peacock replied, " No, 
he will hate what you hate, and hate what you 
like." His temper was eminently destructive. 
He did some good service in the pulling down 
and destroying of much that was utterly cor- 
rupt and bad in our political and social condi- 
tion, but when good and evil were intermixed 
he saw only the evil ; and he habitually ima- 
gined it even where it did not exist. Above all, 
he hated all men in authority. When he wrote 
his history of India, he was prepared to see the 
government of India by the company and its 
servants in the worst possible light. No his- 
torian is really and completely impartial ; he 
necessarily collects his materials in the light 
of some preconceived theory or plan. Those 



54 Talk at a Country House 

extracts from the evidence as to the govern- 
ment of Hastings, which are now shown to be 
garbled by separation from their suppressed 
context, no doubt seemed to him the saUent 
parts, because they supported his foregone con- 
clusions ; and he was probably unconscious of 
dishonesty when he afterwards marshaled and 
embodied them in his history. While we con- 
demn his want of impartiality and the want of 
wisdom in his reflections, we must not overlook 
the skill with which he compressed the substance 
of a volume into a few pages, or the brilliancy 
with which he described a battle. Then as to 
Lord Macaulay, the actual working of the 
judicial code which he compiled and con- 
structed for India has proved him to be a great 
jurist ; but now that the glamour of his rhetoric 
has faded into the light of common day, and 
we see him as he is, we know that he was the 
most brilliant of rhetoricians, that his great ac- 
quaintance with books was always made sub- 
servient to his imagination and his rhetoric, 
and that his gorgeous essays on Clive and 
Hastings in particular are merely imaginative 
reproductions from the pages of Mill, and with 
no authority beyond his. It is a pity that such 
wealth of historical imagination as Lord Ma- 
caulay possessed was not more wisely husbanded 
and expended by him for the benefit of others ; 
for without the help of the historical i/nagination 
no real study of history is possible. 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 



55 



Foster. I dare say you remember the dig- 
nified but friendly expostulation of Sir William 
Jones in reply to Burke's insolent threat that, 
if he heard of his siding with Hastings, he 
would do everything in his power to get him 
recalled ? The letter is characteristic of the 
writer, — kind-hearted, genial, learned, over- 
flowing with intellectual activity, and a love of 
display of all these merits which is pleasing 
from its simplicity. 

The Squire. Chaucer's description of the 
Sergeant of the Law still suits the great lawyer 
even to his love of display, — etalage^ as the 
French call it : — 

" No where so busy a man there n'as, 
And yet he seemed busier than he was." 

Foster. And how gracefully he turns his ex- 
postulation into a compliment, declaring that if 
he was ever unjustly attacked (as in fact Burke 
had threatened to attack him), he was sure 
that his friend would pour, in his defense, the 
mighty flood of his eloquence, like 'AcrcrvpLov 
TToraixolo /xeyas poo'i ! The letter is in the third 
volume of Burke's correspondence, edited by 
Lord Fitzwilliam ; but where does the Greek 
come from ? I have looked in vain for it. 

The Squire. From Callimachus's *' Hymn to 
Apollo." The passage runs thus : — 

'Aaavpiov TroTa/aoio fxe'ya? poo?, oAAa to. noWa. 
Avftara yi^s koI noWhv i<f>' vSart (Tvp(^CTOv e\K€i., 



56 Talk at a Country House 

While we talked, the children left off dan- 
cing, and stayed playing in the hall, while the 
two ladies joined us as listeners. The younger 
now said to her father, " What does that mean ? 
You know, father, that you do not send me to 
Girton or Somerville Hall." 

The Squire replied gravely, — 

" * Madam, the sentence of this Latin is, 
Woman is mannes joy and mannas bliss.' " 

" But," rejoined the young lady, " Mr. Foster 
has just said that the words are Greek ; and 
though Greek of Girton 'is to me unknowe,* 
you have taught me to understand Chanticlere's 
Latin translation." 

The Squire. Well, the sentence of the Greek, 
in such English as I can muster, is : — 

" Great is the flow of the Assyrian river ; 
But on its waters it brings down much filth, 
The offscouring of the land." 

There is at least this resemblance between the 
quotations of Chanticlere and Sir William 
Jones, that each of these polite gentlemen con- 
veys a reproof in the guise of a compliment ; 
and I can tell you a story which shows that the 
latter, no less than the former, enjoyed the 
humor of his covert allusion. My uncle told 
me that, when he was a young Bengal civilian, 
he went with some of his fellows to dine with 
Sir William Jones. After dinner, the judge 
told them of his having received frdm Burke a 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 5 7 

most unbecoming message of threats of what 
he would do if he heard that he (Sir William 
Jones) dared to side with Hastings. " But,'* 
he went on, " I answered him by sending him 
these lines from Callimachus." Here he re- 
peated some Greek lines, and continued : " Per- 
haps you may not remember them " (" Of 
course," interposed my uncle, "we had never 
heard of them "), " but their purport is this : 
*The Euphrates is a noble river, but it rolls 
down all the dead dogs of Babylon to the 
sea.' " 

Foster. Rather a free translation, but very 
terse and epigrammatic. 

The Squire. Yes ; and while the latent irony 
in the four Greek words of compliment in the 
letter is revealed in their context, it is an irony 
so fine that if Burke recalled the context he 
could hardly have resented it. And then we 
have the good judge quietly enjoying his own 
wit and learning, while he told his young guests 
the real meaning of his quotation. I ought to 
tell you that this dinner-table incident must 
have been eight or nine years after the date of 
the letter. 

Foster. Though Sir William Jones lived be- 
fore Bopp and Max Miiller and the age of 
scientific philology, his Oriental learning, rest- 
ing on his classical and modern European 
scholarship, must have had a great influence 



5S Talk at a Country House 

on those young men who went out from school 
at the age of fifteen or sixteen, or even earlier, 
to spend their lives in India, in the civil or 
military service of the company. 

The Squire. I think and read of the men of 
that generation with ever new wonder and ad- 
miration alike for their moral and their intel- 
lectual virtues. As I remarked just now, the 
conduct of the company's servants in India 
after Clive left, in 1760, was infamous. Under 
Clive's second administration, followed by that 
of Hastings, there was considerable improve- 
ment, while under the governorship of Corn- 
wallis and Sir John Shore both the services 
rose to that high condition and character which 
they have ever since maintained, and which I 
believe have seldom been equaled in the his- 
tory of the world for incorruptibility, high- 
mindedness, and commanding genius in all the 
arts of peace and war ; and all this with a cor- 
responding love of letters and literary culture. 

Foster. The personal character and influ- 
ence of Lord Cornwallis and Sir John Shore 
must have had a good deal to do with this gen- 
eral devotion of character. 

The Squire. No doubt. I remember the 
younger Charles Buller saying to me that his 
father, a Bengal civilian of that time, was not 
a man of specially high sentiment, but that in 
any doubtful question he would have been sure 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 59 

to ask himself, " What would Lord Cornwallis 
have thought of it ? " And what a meaning and 
force there must have been in the words of Sir 
John Shore to my own father when he first 
came to India, — " Don't call them ' black fel- 
lows.' " Mountstuart Elphinstone arrived in 
India just as Cornwallis was leaving it ; but in 
him we have the very flower and fruit of this 
period in the highest perfection. When the 
young civilian rode all through the bloody bat- 
tle of Assaye by the side of General Wellesley, 
the Duke of Wellington that was to be, and at 
the storming of Gawalgarh, the latter said that 
Elphinstone had mistaken his vocation, which 
should have been that of a soldier. But he 
soon showed himself equally fitted for the work 
of a diplomatist, in the midst of the intricacies 
of the policy of Lord Wellesley in its conten- 
tion with that of the Mahrattas. In the nego- 
tiations which ended by his cutting a way with 
his little force through the army of the Peishwa 
at Poonah, he showed himself alike a diploma- 
tist and a soldier. In the reorganization of the 
central provinces and as governor of Bombay, 
— and he would have been governor-general, 
had his health allowed, — he proved himself to 
be no less able as an administrator and a ruler 
of men. And you must not forget his literary 
culture and love of books, Greek and Latin, 
English and Italian, which supplied him with 



Talk at a Country House 



examples of action as well as language in which 
to describe it ; while his Persian studies awak- 
ened sentiments deeper than those of the clas- 
sical poets, and at the same time gave him, as 
it had given Hastings, the great practical ad- 
vantage of being able to conduct the business 
of the hour with the native statesmen in their 
own diplomatic language. The life of Elphin- 
stone, as told by Colebrooke, and again by 
Cotton, has all the charm of a romance, and 
yet it is the record of an actual life of hard 
work. I knew him well ; as my father's life- 
long friend he was the hero of my boyish imagi- 
nation, and after his return from India till his 
death I shared in that affectionate friendship 
by which he endeared himself to all who knew 
him. At Assaye, Gawalgarh, and Poonah he 
showed himself to be " worthy," in Chaucer's 
sense of the word ; and in every other respect 
he realized Chaucer's ideal of " a very perfect 
gentle knight." He was " in his port as meek 
as is a maid," — meek in his unaffected humil- 
ity; and indeed you may take Chaucer's de- 
scription, word by word, and you will find the 
counterpart in Elphinstone as he actually was. 
Foster. You remind me of Elphinstone's 
own eulogy on Sir Barry Close, and of the 
lament of Sir Bors over the body of Sir Launce- 
lot. But what is your judgment of the Indian 
policy of Lord Wellesley ? 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 6i 

The Squire (pointing to a full-length portrait 
of a soldier). If that man could come down 
and speak, he could answer your question 
better than I can. 

Foster. The portrait looks like a Romney, 
but who is the man ? 

The Squire. He is Colonel William Kirk- 
patrick, another of those men of action and of 
culture of whom we were just now talking. He 
was first military, and then political secretary to 
Lord Wellesley ; and it is said that when Lord 
Wellesley (then Lord Mornington), on his way 
out, found him on sick leave at the Cape, his 
plans of policy were materially modified, or 
even changed, by what he learned from Kirk- 
patrick. Lord Wellesley may have been as 
ambitious and unscrupulous as Mill depicts 
him ; but when I contrast the condition of the 
two hundred and fifty millions of men, women, 
and children under British rule or influence at 
the present day with the terrible devastation 
and misery under which all India lay while the 
power of the Mahrattas and the Pindarees re- 
mained unbroken, I am very little inclined to 
condemn a policy which did so much to carry 
forward the beneficial work which was not pos- 
sible without the destruction of those powers 
of evil. 

Foster. Who is that man in the naval uni- 
form of the last century, over Clive's portrait ? 



62 Talk at a Country House 

The Squi7-e. Admiral Watson, who took 
Clive's force from Madras to the Hoogly, and 
supported his military operations in Bengal. 
His name always reminds me of an instance of 
the difference of an incident as related by the 
dignified Muse of History and as told by Jack 
to Harry as it actually happened. In Orme 
and other historians you will find that Admiral 
Watson assisted the operations for the attack 
on Calcutta by landing a party of sailors from 
the ships ; but it has come to me in tradition 
that " Old Benn " (a member of the Calcutta 
factory, and afterwards Sir John Walsh, by 
virtue of the sign manual) told young Harry, 
" We sent to Watson to let us have some of 
his sailors, and he answered, * I will send the 
men, but don't make jackasses of them.' Now, 
the very thing we wanted them for was to 
make jackasses of them ;" that is, to drag up 
the guns. 

Foster, Is that bit of paper with some mi- 
nute writing on it, which I see in a glass case, 
one of your Indian relics t 

The Squire. You can hardly read it without 
a magnifying-glass, but it is a letter from my 
father's half-brother, Robert Latham, to his 
mother, from the prison of Hyder Ali at Ban- 
galore. Latham was a Madras civilian, who 
volunteered for service in the war with Hyder. 
He was in Colonel Baillie's detachment, and 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 67, 

was among the survivors of that desperate con- 
test of so many hours, against overwhelming 
numbers, which Mill has so graphically de- 
scribed. They endured a rigorous imprison- 
ment in irons for three years and a half. This 
letter could reach its destination only by being, 
as you see, so written that it could be conveyed 
secretly out of the prison, inclosed in a quill. 

Foster. I remember that the correspondence 
between the governor-general and Elphinstone, 
in those last days of his residency with the 
Peishwa at Poonah, had to be carried on by 
quills. But does Latham tell much of his 
imprisonment ? 

The Squire. We have his story after he was 
again free ; but there is something pathetic in 
ihe fact that this letter from the poor fellow 
tells nothing of his imprisonment except that 
he had then been eighteen months in chains, but 
of the grief with which he thinks of his want 
of love and duty to his mother in his past life. 
She was a stern woman, although very kind to 
her grandchildren, of whom I was one. But, 
stern as she was, we may hope that she did not 
receive this letter with the hardness recorded 
of the mother of another of those prisoners of 
Hyder, of whom it is told that when she heard 
that her son was chained to a fellow-prisoner, 
she only observed, "The man who's chained 
to our Davie will have a gey time of it." 



64 Talk at a Country House 

Foster. Hurrell Froude said that a country- 
house was of use because it was a place where 
you could keep things which you did not like to 
destroy, though they were not worth preserv- 
ing ; but I should rather say, where you can 
keep things worth keeping, but which would, 
without its help, be destroyed. 

The Squire. I often think so. This old house 
is of no importance in itself, — it is no Long- 
leet or Hatfield, — yet it touches the main 
course of English history, from the time of 
Edward the Confessor to the present day, at 
many minute points. The little brook which 
you see there from the terrace has no name, 
and it runs into a river not known out of the 
county ; but that stream runs into the Avon, 
and the Avon into the Severn, which pours the 
waters of its smallest tributaries into the At- 
lantic with its own. And so long as the old 
walls remain there will be two or three persons 
in each generation in whom they will awaken 
and keep alive a sense of the reality of English 
history which cannot be got by books alone. 

Foster. Then do such thoughts make you 
say, when you look at these portraits, as 
the monk said to Wilkie when looking on Ti- 
tian's Last Supper in the Escurial, " These seem 
to me the real men, and we the shadows " t 

The children were still playing in the hall. 
The Squire looked at them and at his daughters, 



The Old Hall and the Portraits 65 

and answered : " I can hardly agree with the 
old monk, while I have these witnesses to the 
reality and the worth of our actual life. Yet 
his words were not without meaning." 

Then the elder lady went back to the piano, 
and played and sang "The Fine Old English 
Gentleman," while her sister joined in the re- 
frain. Their eyes met those of their father ; and 
he smiled approvingly, but I fancied with more 
thought of the singers than of the song, though 
he liked that, too. 



IV. 



A GENERAL ELECTION : RIGHT AND WRONG IN 
POLITICS. 

Men of Somerset ! Arouse you ! 
With the vote the law endows you ; 
Claim the right the law allows you, 
Hear your Country's call ! 

Election Song. 

The stir of a general election broke in upon 
the usual quiet of the old manor house. The 
Squire's eldest son was a candidate for one of 
the divisions of the county. The rooms in the 
old tower were turned into offices, in and out 
of which flowed daily streams of election busi- 
ness. There were committee-men, canvassers, 
and wire-pullers to talk and be talked to; ad- 
dresses ; notices of meetings ; leaflets, serious 
and comic ; new songs set to old popular tunes ; 
photographs of the handsome young candidate, 
with his address on the back, to be sent to 
every elector ; and then, as the great day 
drew on, the thousands of cards to be sent by 
post, one to every voter, with his name and 
number and polling-place, and a facsimile of 
the ballot paper, with an explanation how it 



A General Election 67 

should be used. The candidate's wife, zealous 
alike for her husband and for the cause he 
represented, helped as only a woman can help 
in such work, rousing a new enthusiasm as 
often as the crowd met the carriage in which 
she sat by her husband's side, or as she came 
into the meeting with him, while hundreds of 
voices joined in the " March of the Men of 
Somerset " or " Wait till the Polling-Day." The 
candidate himself, while ably supported by the 
leading men of his party, understood his own 
work well, from his experience in county busi- 
ness, in which he had for some years taken an 
active part. The Squire wrote leaflets and 
songs, and took the chair at such of the meet- 
ings as were within his reach ; and I thought 
myself fortunate in this my first opportunity of 
seeing both the serious and the humorous side 
of a general election. The humor was for the 
most part, but not always, good humor. The 
"civil dudgeon" sometimes "grew high, and 
men fell out, they knew not why;" or at least 
when they would have found it hard to explain 
why. At one of the meetings to which I went 
with my friends, a sound like that of carpet- 
beating, at the further end of the hall, made us 
on the platform wonder whether the wielders 
of the sticks were not Irishmen, instead of the 
young farmers they seemed to be. At another 
meeting, the candidate's brother stood for an 



68 Talk at a Country House 

hour apparently speaking, but with no sound 
from his mouth being audible. On still an- 
other evening, there were ominous signs that 
our opponents had packed the meeting, and 
might be expected to storm the platform, when 
a sturdy farmer arrived with what Mrs. Quickly 
would have called "a rescue or two," and 
which, with strategical skill, he formed into a 
wedge, with a chimney-sweep with brush and 
bag at its point. No one dared face the in- 
finite possibilities of that brush, and the foe 
was scattered. But our side was generally the 
popular one; and on one occasion I was 
amused at seeing our assailants driven to take 
refuge behind the candidate's wife, as she sat 
fearless on the platform, while they tried to 
assure her it was for her own safety that they 
begged her to escape with them through a 
window six feet from the ground. But for the 
most part these meetings, of which we had 
sometimes three in one evening, and often in 
the open air, as the time was summer, were 
not only friendly, but enthusiastic, as they 
consisted chiefly of our own party. And I was 
much struck with the seriousness of the people, 
enthusiastic as they were ; men, and women 
too, were so evidently desiring to understand 
the arguments of the speakers, and to learn 
from what they heard. 

The writ had come down to the sheriff, the 



A General Election 69 

nomination had been made, and the eve of the 
polling-day had arrived. 

" Venit summa dies, et ineluctabile fatum." 

At night I went with the Squire and his 
youngest son and daughter to a last meeting, 
while our candidate and his wife went to an- 
other. The enthusiasm was great, yet I saw 
something serious as well as earnest in the 
faces before me. We knew that other meetings 
were being held that night, and that another 
host was mustering for the morrow, arrayed 
against us, with hopes no less high than our 
own. A solemn feeling of suspense, and even 
of awe, fell upon me, and I doubt not on 
those with me ; and though the battle was to 
be fought with ballot papers in orderly polling- 
places, I could not but think that as great 
issues might be at stake as were at Agincourt, 
and that there was no unfitness in recalling as 
I did the words of Shakespeare : — 

" From camp to camp through the foul womb of night 
The hum of either army stilly sounds, 
That the fixed sentinels almost receive 
The secret whispers of each other's watch. 
Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames 
Each battle sees the other's umber'd face ; 
Steed threatens steed, in high and boastful neighs 
Piercing the night's dull ear, and from the tents 
The armourers, accomplishing the knights, 
With busy hammers closing rivets up, 
Give dreadful note of preparation." 



70 Talk at a Country House 

Then followed that long day of eager hopes 
and fears and guesses at what must remain un- 
known till the morrow, while the rival candi- 
dates and their wives spent the day in visiting 
every polling-place. They once or twice met 
and crossed each other, with the courtesy which 
seldom fails English gentlefolk under such cir- 
cumstances. 

I am not old enough to recall, but the Squire 
has described to me, the days when the free- 
holders journeyed from every end of the county 
to their county town, there to choose two knights 
of the shire by acclamation at the hustings, or, 
if need were, by voting, presided over by the 
sheriff, who kept the poll open day after day, 
and even week after week, as long as there 
was a single voter to come in. The several 
forms, ending with that of the two chosen 
knights, girded with swords, riding in proces- 
sion at the head of their supporters, were prob- 
ably little changed from the days of Hamden, 
or perhaps even of Simon de Montfort ; and 
though the counties had been divided, and 
other polling-places added to that of the county 
town, the main proceedings were still the same, 
as the Squire has told me, before the passing 
of the Ballot Act. On the hustings, a great 
wooden structure erected in the open air, the 
High Sheriff presided over a crowd of the free- 
holders and the larger tenants of the county. 



A General Election 71 



The Queen's writ was read ; the names of the 
rival candidates were proposed one after an- 
other, with the shouts of their several support- 
ers. As nothing turned on the decision of the 
sheriff, he might be pardoned if he looked to 
the side of his own party and declared that 
their ayes had it. His decision was challenged, 
and the day for the polling appointed. My 
friend gave me an account of his doings, both 
as county magistrate and as party committee- 
man, in his own village, during one such poll- 
ing-day. There was a polling-place in the vil- 
lage, and his story was this : — 

A few days before, there had been something 
of an election riot in a large town some ten 
miles off, and a timid householder in the vil- 
lage, having taken it into his head that the 
rioters would now march upon his village, made 
oath to that effect, and demanded the appoint- 
ment of special constables. The justices could 
not refuse the demand, and the Squire had to 
swear in the constables, and to provide them 
with staves, for which the county had after- 
wards to pay a bill of twenty pounds. A strong 
body of rural police was also marched in. 
Their superintendent told my friend — the only 
magistrate there — that, in the event of a riot, 
the special constables would be of no use if 
they were at the time dispersed among the 
crowd, and that they must be kept together in 



72 Talk at a Country House 

a body, in case they should be wanted to act. 
So he locked them all up in the parish school- 
room ; they meekly submitting to an order 
which possibly the magistrate had no legal 
power to enforce^ He. sent them in some old 
newspapers, and all the bread and cold meat 
■which the committee of the rival candidates 
had left unconsumed in the several public 
houses j and so they were left, losing their 
votes and their share in the general fun, till 
the polling-day was over. The polling-booth 
was a wooden shed set up on a bit of open 
ground in the middle of the village, with a 
shelter for the officers and their books, — a 
shelter luckily not wanted, as the day proved 
to be one of bright autumn weather. The 
church clock struck eight, and the Squire, who 
was a keen party politician no less than an ac- 
tive magistrate, was the first to give his vote. 
The incredible muddle-headedness of voters, 
which is now hid from all but the presiding 
officer and the personation agent, who sit in 
secret conclave in the polling-room, could then 
be witnessed and laughed at in open day. 
There, for instance, was a freeholder who had 
never heard of the House of Commons, but 
whose father had turned a bit of roadside waste 
into a freehold by building a house upon it, 
and living there without disturbance from the 
parish overseers. He had been brought up by 



A General Election 73 

the zealous agent of one party, but was now 
clutched at by him of the other side. When 
asked for whom he voted, he could only look 
scared and say that he was a stoutish gentle- 
man with a bald head, but he did not rightly 
remember his name. And then when the poll- 
ing-clerk, who had at first forbidden the rival 
agents to interfere, did at last reluctantly say 
that each might tell the voter the names of their 
respective candidates, the poor bewildered man 
replied again and again, " That 's not the name," 
till all were exhausted ; but then, after there 
was no other to come, he thought it was the 
last which he had heard, and so voted, to his 
own relief and that of every one except the 
discomfited agent. There were no telegrams 
in those days, but a mounted messenger came 
in every hour from headquarters only to report 
to the Squire's committee that they were losing 
everywhere, and to carry back the like bad re- 
port from them. Still they put a good face on 
the matter, and kept their own counsel, in spite 
of the eager inquiries from the other side, who 
for some reason had not provided for keeping 
themselves informed of their own success. The 
last incident which the Squire told me of was a 
report to his committee of two voters still left 
in an outlying village. An omnibus was char- 
tered in hot haste ; the voters were brought in 
before the clock struck four, and one voted on 



74 Talk at a Country House 

one side, and one on the other. Then the 
special constables were set free from a custody 
which had been inflicted on none but them- 
selves ; the crowd of voters and non-voters dis- 
persed in good humor, though still in ignorance 
of how the day had gone ; and my friend went 
home to learn the full account of the utter 
beating his party had received. 

But these are memories of an almost forgot- 
ten past. Now all these things are shrouded, 
by the secrecy of the ballot, in a silence which 
becomes, as I have said, solemn and almost 
awful to those to whom the election is a serious 
interest, as the polling-day goes on. At last, 
then, night had fallen on the fight, which was 
lost and won, though no one knew how the day 
had gone. Next morning the counting began 
in the Court House of the principal town in the 
division. The sheriff who presided had given 
me permission to be among the favored few 
who were allowed to be present during the 
counting. These were the candidates and their 
wives and their agents and the officials who 
had to count. The seals of the several ballot 
boxes were examined and broken, and the 
number of voting papers in each was verified ; 
then the whole were thrown together, " made 
hay of," and finally separated according to the 
names of the candidates for which they were 
marked. This separation went on at four tables 



A Getieral Election 75 

at once ; and as each packet of one hundred 
papers was completed, it was filed with a blue 
or a red label, as that candidate's color might 
be, by the counting clerk, and then handed by 
him to the agent of the opposite side. If he 
was satisfied with it, he handed it to the other 
agent, who made a like examination ; and if 
there was — as sometimes happened — a doubt 
as to the meaning of the voter's mark, or any 
other question as to the reception of the ballot 
paper, the point was decided by the sheriff. 
An equal number of red and of blue labels lay 
on the table, for tying up the successive packets 
of a hundred ballot papers for one or the other 
candidate. The keen eyes of our candidate's 
wife were the first to discover that the wrappers 
of her husband's color were exhausted, while 
several remained on the other side. The count- 
ing was soon finished \ the numbers were called 
out in the room ; and the sheriff proceeded to 
announce the result to the eager crowd which 
was waiting outside. Our candidate was elected 
by a majority of seven hundred and ninety- 
three votes ; and the declaration of the poll 
was received with enthusiastic shouts by his 
supporters, while those who were there in the 
hope of another result slipped silently away. 
The defeated candidate was not the old mem- 
ber, nor of his party, but the important ques- 
tion had been whether the constituency had, or 



76 Talk at a Country House 

had not, changed from its old political faith. 
There could be no doubt that the popular feel- 
ing, in so far as it could be shown by public 
meetings, was in my friend's favor, but nothing 
but the actual poll could tell the opinion of the 
silent voter, who did not go to the meetings 
on either side. To borrow Burke's simile, till 
then we had heard the voice of the noisy grass- 
hoppers, but the stately cattle were browsing 
in silence. Now the newly elected M. P. knew 
that a majority of both were for him. He had 
to return thanks again and again to the crowd 
who accompanied him from the town hall to 
his hotel, from the hotel to the railway station. 
The carriage in which he and his wife sat was 
drawn — *' hauled," as the country people call 
it — by their enthusiastic supporters through a 
crowd which numbered thousands, and covered 
perhaps a mile of ground. We were half an 
hour in reaching the station, out of which the 
train could hardly make its way. It was a 
triumphal progress, for the new M. P. was al- 
ready well known in his county. 

The old Squire, with his younger children 
and his grandchildren, had waited at home for 
the telegram which was to tell how the battle 
had gone. The news had been telegraphed in 
various other directions. And when we — for 
I had returned with the new M. P. and his 
wife — reached the station where our carriage 



A General Election *j*j 

was waiting for us, we were welcomed by a 
band of music heading a procession gathered 
from many miles around. The horses were 
taken out, and the carriage was "hauled" by 
the enthusiastic crowd through the village, and 
so up to the old manor house. The people 
had of their own accord put up triumphal arches. 
The Squire's younger children and grandchil- 
dren, after hanging out a great flag on the 
tower, and smaller ones at every window, had 
joined the procession on its road ; and it at 
last entered the gateway through the old bat- 
tlemented wall, led by some of the principal 
tenants, while the band played " Auld Lang 
Syne," and the Squire stood at the door to wel- 
come his son and his son's wife. It was a 
grand sight. I shall be told, and shall grant, 
that it is common enough on such occasions ; 
but if I am asked why, then, it seems so striking, 
I answer that it was a grand sight, and a sight 
to awake our deepest thoughts and feelings, to 
see that multitude of faces of men, women, and 
children, full of gladness and of love for those 
whom they were rejoicing to honor while shar- 
ing their triumph. It was, and from its nature 
must be, a passing enthusiasm, but it was not 
the less real for all that ; the brightness of the 
moment must soon fade into the light of com- 
mon day, but all had been the better as well as 
the happier that even for a moment they had 



78 Talk at a Country House 

been raised above themselves ; and to many it 
would be a memory that would never die. 
The Squire and his son each said a few words 
of thanks, which were heartily responded to. 
The shadows of evening were falling as the 
band again struck up " Auld Lang Syne," and 
the people slowly filed through the arch- 
way j when the last had disappeared v/e went 
slowly into the house, and I heard the old 
Squire repeat to himself, "Nunc Dimittis." 

The newly elected knight of the shire went to 
London to take his seat at the meeting of 
Parliament, and the Squire and I walked down 
the aX^enue and sat again under the shade of 
Berowne's oak, while the gentle splashing of 
the little waterfall sounded in our ears, and ac- 
companied without disturbing our talk. The 
Squire had been laughing at some rather strong 
abuse of his son in the local paper which 
represented the defeated party ; but as I fan- 
cied that he might possibly be more annoyed 
than he allowed, I said : — 

" It is really too bad that a respectable 
newspaper should make such grossly false 
statements as to the moral and intellectual 
unfitness of the successful candidate, and of 
his election having been due to promises im- 
possible of fulfillment, and to every other kind 
of influence which could be exercised over 
what they now call an ignorant electorate." 



A Ge7ieral Election 79 

The Squire. That is nothing to what the los- 
ing party always says, though without rushing 
into print, in such days of excitement as follow 
a contested election. It is pretty Fanny's way; 
and the man who wins can afford to say with 
the navvy, when they laughed at him because 
his wife beat him, " It amuses her, and it does 
not hurt me." 

Foster. I should say " ugly Fanny " and 
her ugly way. I cannot help feeling more 
annoyed than you seem to be. 

The Squire. I am older, and therefore tougher 
than you. When men get upon politics, they 
should allow each other the liberty which each 
claims for himself, of using words in a parlia- 
mentary sense, as the phrase goes. If a cor- 
respondent subscribes himself your obedient 
humble servant, you do not therefore expect 
him to wait on you at dinner, or carry your 
portmanteau to the station. Lord St. Leon- 
ards, in his " Handy Book on Property Law," 
says that, though the Court of Chancery will 
enforce the terms of any contract, it will not 
hold a vendor to be bound by what it calls the 
babble of the auction-room. The language at 
an election, like that at an auction, though it 
may be in the way of blame instead of praise, 
is high-flown, exaggerated, and has a conven- 
tional meaning which it does not bear in ordi- 
nary life. I do not defend it ; I am sorry for 



8o Talk at a Country House 

it, and wish it could be avoided, especially as I 
know that some people do more or less accept 
such language in its ordinary sense, and so 
become embittered in feeling, whether they 
believe the abuse to be true or know it to be 
false. There is plenty of evil in the world. I 
am sorry for it, but cannot help it. I know 
that the day may be rainy and the road muddy ; 
but there is plenty of sunshine, too, and we 
shall get to our journey's end, if we do not 
mind being splashed with mud and getting a 
little wet on the way. Or you may change the 
metaphor, and say with the book of Proverbs, 
" Where no oxen are, the crib is clean : but 
much increase is by strength of the ox." 

Foster. Though I shall be arguing against 
myself, I can cap your quotation with a pas- 
sage which I lighted upon in a pamphlet in the 
library, the other day, and which I think I 
remember : " The free expression of opinion, 
as our experience has taught us, is the safety 
valve of passion. That noise when the steam 
escapes alarms the timid ; but it is the sign 
that we are safe." And again : " I have lived 
now for many years in the midst of the hottest 
and noisiest of the workshops of constitutional 
freedom, and have seen that amidst the clatter 
and the din a ceaseless labor is going on ; stub- 
born matter is reduced to obedience, and the 
brute powers of society, like the fire, air, water, 



A General Election 



and minerals of nature, are, with clamor, indeed, 
but also with might, educated and shaped into 
the most refined and regular forms of useful- 
ness for man." ^ 

T/ie Squire. You have a capital memory, 
and the whole passage is worthy of Milton or 
Burke. The Old Parliamentary Hand was 
young when he wrote that; but fifty years' 
experience has evidently only confirmed him 
in his beliefs. So far as my own observation 
goes, I should say that the fastidious and 
sensitive men, who try to keep aloof from the 
dust and din, and still baser elements of poli- 
tics, and try to rise above party, always, in 
practice, sink below it. The only men whom I 
have known to rise above party are those who, 
with moral and intellectual earnestness, throw 
themselves sometimes into one, and sometimes 
into the other party, as either seems to them 
right or wrong. That state of negation which 
the non-party man attains to is, in practice, a 
dull, half-hearted conservatism, as far inferior 
to the true conservatism as to the true liberal- 
ism. Think, too, of the unconscious selfish- 
ness of these men, who live in the enjoyment 
of all the infinite blessings of civilization, and 
have no words except of censure and contempt 
for those by whose hard work, with all its 

1 Letter to the Right Rev. IV. Skinner, D. D., on the 
Functions of Laymen in Church, by W. E. Gladstone. 



82 Talk at a Country House 

begriming incidents, and by that alone, all 
those blessings have been won and are still 
secured for them. " For us was thy back so 
bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fin- 
gers so deformed ; thou wert our conscript, on 
whom the lot fell, and, fighting our battles, 
wert so marred." 

Foster. Our conversation is getting to be as 
full of quotations as the play of " Hamlet ; " 
yet I must add another, that I may ask you 
a question about it. Do you agree with Fal- 
staff that it is better to be on the wrong side 
than on none, and do you think it a shame to 
be on any but one ? 

The Squire. To a young man, like yourself, 
I am always inclined to say Yes ; to an old 
one, No. The experience and observation of 
years lead me to contract rather than enlarge 
my sphere of possible knowledge. In politics, 
even the statesman of genius rarely sees more 
than his next step, and only after he has taken 
that sees again the next. To me the pursuits 
of the student of letters or the student of 
science are far less interesting than those of 
the young politician who aspires to the reali- 
zation of his ideals of the constitution under 
which he lives. As I said the other day, his 
ideal seems to him complete and perfect, and 
waiting only to be realized in actual life. It 
is well that a man should begin his study of 



A Ge7ie7'al Election 83 

life in the light of such an ideal, and that he 
should believe that it is so true and good that 
any contradiction must be wrong ; and there- 
fore I said, in answer to your former question, 
that I should say to a young man it was wrong 
to be on any side but one ; that is, on the one 
side which represents and embodies his own 
ideal of the political life of his country. By 
all means would I have him enjoy this his 
honest belief; let him share heartily the tri- 
umphs of the party who hold up that ideal, 
and in the fear that its loss will be the loss of 
all that a good citizen holds dear. If these 
things be absolutely true and right, then all 
that opposes them must be false and wrong. 
But if he has the wisdom and the courage to 
look and see how his ideals stand the test of 
experience, he will again and again see them 
broken up and set aside by a force which they 
are unable to resist, while the world not only 
goes on just as before, but with such manifest 
advantage that he is obliged, and eventually 
glad, to confess that his ideal was not the 
absolute law which governed the world of 
politics, but only one small and partial repre- 
sentation of it. And so the old man answers 
the other half of the question, and says that 
it is not a shame to be on any side but one 
in politics. 

Foster, Then you do not think that there 



84 Talk at a Country House 

is a right and a wrong side in party politics, 
nor any such difference between Conservatives 
and Liberals ? 

The Squire. Not a pin to choose, so long as 
the man honestly holds with either. There is 
often much wrong-doing, much that is evil as 
well as mistaken, in each party; but each 
party represents one side, one half of the true 
and the good, while it opposes the other. It 
does not matter which leg you put into your 
breeches first, said Dr. Johnson, but don't 
stand there getting cold while you are doubt- 
ing which leg it shall be. 

Foster. Yet, Squire, I have heard you, at 
our late meetings, stir the whole audience to 
enthusiasm by telling them of the merits of 
your side, and the wrong-doings of the other. 

The Squire. That was counsel pleading for 
client ; but the jury heard the other side, too, 
before their verdict was given. Judgment fol- 
lowed, not for that constituency only, but for 
the whole nation, through its representatives 
in Parliament, and it will be found to be a 
compromise, or " resolution of forces," with one 
step forward on the line so indicated. Politics 
mean action, not science nor even logic. New 
things and new conditions of things are con- 
stantly coming above the horizon, which had 
never been dreamed of by our political philos- 
ophy. These demand action, not abstract 



A General Election 85 

inquiry, and it is only in and by action tliat 
the right course is found. To act, you must 
take a side ; you cannot be on both sides at 
once, though both have to be reckoned with 
in the end. The final action is really a joint 
one ; not the triumph of a victor over the 
vanquished. If there were an absolute right 
and wrong in politics, it is inconceivable that 
the opinion of the whole nation should be — 
as we know it usually is — so nearly divided 
that the balance of parties is turned by a 
very small number of votes, and that this 
minority, though so little less than the major- 
ity, always acquiesces in the government of 
that majority. And so I say that Falstaff's 
doctrine, which you quote, is true if properly 
understood. 

Foster. I should call this the philosophy of 
party. The practical view of Burke, that no 
political action can be effective unless men act 
together in a party, and to this end make 
mutual concessions and compromises among 
themselves, always seems to me intelligible 
and true, though one often hears it condemned 
by those who, as you say, sink below party 
while professing to rise above it. But when 
you speak so of the absence of an absolute 
right and wrong in politics, and of its being 
the business of a statesman merely to ascertain 
the next step, and to take that, may we not 



86 Talk at a Country House 

underrate the work really done by the great 
men who appear from time to time as the leaders 
of the nation ? The British Constitution is 
often compared to an oak ; may it not as prop- 
erly be compared to a castle, or palace, or 
cathedral ? May we not, in Ben Jonson's 
phrase, say that it is made as well as born, and 
that art gives the form and fashion to nature ? 
The Squire. Illustrations prove nothing, 
though they often throw light on a subject, and 
make an argument clearer by calling imagination 
to the aid of reason. Both your illustrations — 
the tree and the building — are good. Either 
will answer our purpose here. Let us take the 
oak. The oak has grown to be what it is in 
accordance with a law somehow contained in 
the original acorn. Its growth has somehow 
(we know not how) depended on the growth of 
its roots and branches ; and while we cannot 
say that any one of these, however small, was 
not necessary to its growth, we may confidently 
say that it could not have become what it is 
without the vigorous growth of its greater roots 
and limbs. The whole is made up of its parts, 
and could never have existed without them ; 
yet they have only come into existence, and 
still exist, as results of the original law in the 
acorn. And so it seems to me to be with the 
nation. It is not a mere metaphor to say that 
the life of a nation is a reality, a fact. This 



A General Election Z^j 

national life is somehow made up of, or is one 
with, the life of the men of the nation's suc- 
cessive generations. This life is more, not 
less, strong and active in our great statesmen 
than in our ordinary citizens. While we stand 
close by some great personality of our own 
generation, and watch his immediate action, it 
seems as if his individual intellect and will 
were directing and driving the course of events, 
which he might have made otherwise if he had 
so chosen ; but when an intervening distance 
of time enables us to see what the whole course 
of events has been, we discover that, great as 
the man was, and great as was his mastery over 
the events of the hour, he, no less than the 
least important of the men around him, was 
working in obedience to an irresistible law. 
If you are not afraid of the language of Bacon 
and Milton, you may say that this law is an 
idea in the mind of God, which he has called 
on his Englishmen to carry out in their na- 
tional life. Anyhow, it is a law. 

Foster. One question more. I have heard 
you tell more than one meeting that the ballot 
is secret beyond doubt ; but what do you say of 
its morality ? 

The Squire. I have often wished to deal with 
that point while speaking, or in one of our leaf- 
lets, but, like Mr. Parker, have always been de- 
terred by the fear I should make that " darker 



88 Talk at a Country House 

which was dark enough without." The question 
is one of casuistry, a science, or an art, in which 
I have little skill. 

Foster. Casuistry has, no doubt, a bad 
sound, like sophistry and Jesuitism ; yet, if the 
case be really one of conscience, it must be 
possible as well as desirable to find some solu- 
tion of it ; and so he must have thought who 
founded a professorship of casuistry and moral 
philosophy combined at Cambridge. 

The Squire. Grote and John Mill had been 
all their lives in favor of the ballot ; but when it 
was at last carried they were found in the other 
camp. The intimidation of the shopkeepers by 
their customers in the great towns, for which 
the ballot had been demanded by the older 
Radicals, had almost died out; and it was 
therefore surely better to retain the more 
manly form of open voting. And there are still 
politicians of the study rather than of the 
market-place, who insist on the loss of manli- 
ness in secret voting, and who overlook the 
facts obvious to all who remember the elections 
by open voting, and know that but for the 
ballot the voting must be carried on under 
the protection of soldiers as well as police, or 
there would be serious rioting. 

Foster. Whatever the manliness of open 
voting under such protection, I admit that 
without it there could be only the traditional 



A Ge7ieral Election 89 

manliness of Donnybrook Fair. But what of 
the farm laborers and the village shopkeepers 
in the counties ? We have lately heard and 
seen evidence enough of the great pressure, 
call it legitimate or undue, put upon these 
classes by the squires, the parsons, the farmers, 
and even by their fellow-workmen. It is at 
their peril if they do not promise their vote to 
the candidate for whom it is demanded. Ought 
they to keep that promise when given ? 

The Squire. I might put you off with some of 
the old stories of the rustic humorists and 
their evasions of the question how they had 
voted : as when one said that when the friends 
of the red candidate had solicited his vote he 
had pleased them by his answer : he had no 
less pleased the Primrose Dame by what he 
promised her : and when he went to the poll 
he pleased himself. Or when another told his 
story thus : " When the blues asked for my 
vote, I promised it to them ; then I promised 
it to the reds when they canvassed me ; and 
when I got into the polling-place by myself, I 
said ' Conscience forever ! ' shut my eyes, and 
made a cross somewhere on the paper, and 
not even I know how I voted." But I am 
afraid this will hardly answer your question. 

Foster. Not quite. I think no one can 
read the clauses of the Ballot Act without see- 
ing that the act intends and provides not only 



9© Talk at a Country House 

that it shall be unlawful for any man to try to 
find out how another has voted, but also that 
the voter shall be able to mislead and deceive 
the man who does make the attempt. But is 
such deception moral as well as legal ? 

The Squire. If the voter's position is such 
that he incurs only some social disfavor among 
his neighbors if he does not deceive them as 
to his vote, we should only pity his cowardice ; 
but if he is a poor man, a laborer or a small 
shopkeeper, who will really lose his work, or 
the custom on which his livelihood depends, if 
he is known to have voted against the will of 
his employer or customer, the case is different. 
Should he have no wife or child, he will no 
doubt take the manlier and the better course if 
he defies the intimidator and takes the conse- 
quence of refusing to say how he voted, though 
I, at least, will not say that every man is to be 
condemned who has not the courage to be a 
martyr. But if martyrdom is the nobler course 
when the sacrifice is only of the man himself, 
what if it includes his wife and children .'' We 
know the horrible story of the Scottish Cove- 
nanter who was urged to recant by the torture, 
not of himself, but of his child stretched on 
the rack before his eyes. I cannot think that 
a man is called to endure such martyrdom as 
that. I say that all the guilt, not part of it, 
lies on the head of the questioner ; and the 



A General Election ^i 

voter who is asked how he voted, and knows 
that the ruin of his wife and children hangs 
on his answer, not only has a moral right to 
deceive the man who asks the question, but 
ought to deceive him. 

Foster. Even to telling a direct lie ? 1 do 
not know why it is, but we always seem to 
make a distinction between a lie and an 
evasion, and to shrink from telling a lie, even 
while we think ourselves justified in resorting 
to an evasion which we mean to have the 
exact effect of the lie. 

The Squire, It is an instinct, or a habit, which 
keeps us out of much mischief in ordinary life, 
though the Gospel seems to declare that the 
state of the heart is to be looked to, rather 
than the outward deed. And here the motive 
is good, though the act is not so. People who 
sit comfortably in their armchairs and con- 
demn the wickedness of the poor man who 
tells his employer a lie as to the way he voted 
do not look at the whole case. The Constitu- 
tion gives the man a vote, and it is his clear 
duty to use it, and that in accordance with 
his own judgment as to who is the right man 
to vote for. It is a plain question of con- 
science. He is bound to vote, and to vote 
according to his own belief as to the right 
side. If his wife and children are not to lose 
the daily bread which he earns for them, he 



92 Talk at a Country House 

must promise his employer that he will vote 
against his conscience. He makes the promise. 
Is he bound to keep it or to break it ? By the 
wrongful act of his employer or customer, he 
has been put in a position in which he must 
do wrong either way; which course does his 
conscience require him to take? On the one 
hand, he must not only break his original 
promise, but by any further lie which may be 
needful conceal the fact that he has broken 
it; on the other hand, he will have failed in 
his duty to his country and his fellow-citizens 
by voting for the man whom he believes not 
to be the right one. It is a hard case of con- 
science. The man in the comfortable armchair 
will most likely tell you that it is very easy. 
To tell a lie, or series of lies, to an actual 
employer is a plainly wicked act, though the 
conduct of him who requires it cannot be de- 
fended. But to be false to the duty you owe 
your country is only to be false to a dim, far- 
off abstraction ; and it is surely pardonable to 
do this as the lesser of the two evils ? I cannot 
think so. Luther preached against what the 
reformers called the righteousness of the law, 
warning the anxious seeker after that right- 
eousness that he must beware that the devil 
does not get possession of his conscience, and 
so make him hear the devil's voice when he 
thinks he is hearing that of God, It is a hard 



A General Election 93 

case, not to be lightly settled by us who are 
not called to the responsibility of a decision 
for ourselves. Mrs. Gaskell, the most moral 
and most Christian of our novelists, has a 
tale which might be called " The Duty of 
Telling Lies." And I often think of that story 
of the Jacobite laird who was saved from the 
gallows by the false swearing of his old ser- 
vant, who, when he was afterwards asked by 
his master how he, a God-fearing man, could 
have declared to such falsehoods in God's pres- 
ence, replied, " I would rather trust my soul 
with the Lord than your body with the Whigs." 

Foster. " Splendide mendax, et in omne virgo 
nobilis aevum." 

The Squire. After all, our illustrations do not 
run on all fours with the thing illustrated. 
May it ever remain dishonest to an English- 
man to tell a lie. But, " Woe to him through 
whom the offence cometh." 



V. 

LOVE AND MARRIAGE. 

Hail, wedded Love ! 

Milton. 

The sun was shining brightly and the church 
bells were pealing merrily, as we all walked 
back through the village from a wedding. The 
bride had been the playfellow, and then the 
maid, of the Squire's daughter ; her father and 
mother lived in the village ; and she had that 
morning been married to a young carpenter, 
with whom she was now to share a new home, 
not many miles away. I imagine that the 
Squire had given the young couple some sub- 
stantial aid in setting up there ; while his 
daughters had helped to make the new home 
bright for the future, as well as the old one 
gay for the wedding day. The Squire's daugh- 
ter and eldest granddaughter had shared the 
office of bridesmaid with the bride's sister; 
but I learned with some surprise that there 
was to be no special merry-making at the 
Court, as the people in this part of the coun- 
try call the manor house, while dropping the 



Love and Marriage 95 

prefix of " Knighton," " Sutton," or whatever 
may be the name of the village in which the 
particular manor court was formerly held. 
After church we went with the wedding party 
to the cottage of the father and mother. There 
we all drank the health of the bride and bride- 
groom ; the Squire spoke a few words of hope 
and of blessing, the ladies kissed the bride, 
and we walked homeward along the church 
path and up the avenue. I ventured to break 
the silence by asking the Squire's daughter 
how it was that her father, who had so many 
likings for the fine old English gentleman, all 
of the olden time, did not make the wedding 
of the daughter of people attached to his 
family by long services, an occasion for old- 
fashioned festivities of some kind. 

" I am sure he is quite right," she replied. 
"At a wedding at which I was bridesmaid, not 
very long ago, the bride's father and mother 
insisted upon having what they called old- 
fashioned customs. So we had a long, dreary 
wedding breakfast, where the wretched bride 
sat opposite a huge cake, looking the picture 
of I don't know what, while the clergyman 
and her father and a number of other peo- 
ple made stupid speeches. Mr, Oldham, the 
bride's father, lamented that the good old 
wedding breakfasts, such as that at which we 
were, were going out of fashion, and that 



96 Talk at a Country House 

people were now expected, on such occasions, 
to swallow a biscuit and a cup of coffee, as if 
they were at a railway station, with only five 
minutes allowed. I thought the great tedious 
breakfast horrid, and the new fashion much 
better." 

"But I dare say you had dancing in the 
evening : and I am sure you like that." 

"I do always delight in dancing," she re- 
turned. "Yet even that seemed out of place 
on that evening; it was so plain that the 
mother and sisters were thinking of something 
else than the company, and would have been 
only too glad to have the house to themselves 
in quiet. And I could not help feeling for 
them, and losing all pleasure in the dancing. 
But ask my father what he thinks about it all." 

Here the young lady walked on " in maiden 
meditation, fancy free," the rest of the party 
dispersed, and I found myself alone with the 
Squire at the top of the terrace steps. I said : — 

" Your daughter has just been giving me 
your reasons — or perhaps I should say her 
own — for not having any merry-making up 
here after the wedding." 

The Squire. That is a kind of paternal gov- 
ernment or paternal patronage for which I have 
no liking. The children are grown up and 
have homes of their own ; and we must respect 
those homes, however humble. There are 



Love and Marriage 97 

happy as well as sad times for thoughts and 
feelings which can be shared only by the two 
or three nearest to us. Such sympathy as it 
was possible for us to show to-day we have 
shown by going to church, and there taking 
our place in the one great family : to attempt 
more seems to me a sort of intrusion, and even 
profanation. We know little, and share less, 
of the deeper thoughts and feelings of those 
nearest to us : how can we know or share those 
of these poor people, divided from us by lines 
of impassable reserve and reticence ? This 
morning, while I thought of other marriages, 
past and to come, and of Tennyson's pictures 
of the bride when first she wears the orange 
flower and when she returns to her old home 
again, I considered, too, how certainly these 
good people were happy in the like thoughts 
and feelings, though they had never read Ten- 
nyson, nor put these thoughts and feelings into 
words like his. Depend upon it, there is as 
much and as true romance in the young hearts, 
and in the old ones, too, in that cottage as in 
those in this house. 

Foster. You say the romance of old hearts, 
too : then may I believe that you do not think 
love a mere fading flower, which must soon 
perish ? If you had long ago written such a 
poem as Coleridge's " Love," you would not 
have prefixed to it, any number of years after- 
wards, those verses of Petrarch ? 



98 Talk at a Country House 

The Squire. I know the poem well. It is full 
of that soft beauty of images, emotion, and ex- 
pression with which Coleridge so often reminds 
us of Shakespeare and Spenser. But what of 
Petrarch's verses .'' 

Foster. After the customary classical phrases 
about the wounds inflicted by Cupid's arrows, 
he says that age has changed all this ; and that 
when he reads his youthful verses again 7neiis 
horret, he shrinks from the voice and words 
which sound like those of another, and not his 
own. I am glad you do not agree with Cole- 
ridge in this cynical mocking at his own be- 
lief. 

The Squire. There is another poem of Cole- 
ridge's, a charming piece of prose and verse, 
called "The Improvisatore," in which he him- 
self replies to and puts aside that cynical doc- 
trine which you regret. Coleridge's ideas of 
love, and of life generally, are always high and 
noble, — no man's higher ; but in their realiza- 
tion he fell far short. He had the intellect of 
a wise man and the conscience of a good man, 
but a will weak and unstable in the extreme ; 
and great teacher as he was to his generation, 
and will be to generations yet to come, there 
was but too much reason for the remorse with 
which he mourned, but could not in this life 
redeem, his own shortcomings. He was no 
doubt sincere when he said, — 



Love and Marriaze 



99 



" To be beloved is all I need, 
And whom I love, I love indeed ; " 

but side by side with tliis is the fact that he 
could not live with his wife and the mother of his 
children. We have all more or less reason to 
know wdth remorse what it is to be possessed 
of the evil spirit of contradiction ; but the worst 
form of this possession is that which separates 
husband and wife from heart and hearth. You 
cannot wonder that poor Coleridge one day 
made the cynical lines of Petrarch his own, and 
another the words of belief in an undying love 
in which Beaumont and Fletcher, Burns and 
Moore, have embodied that faith. In one 
sense it is true that love is a fading flower ; but 
it is still more true that just as the promises of 
childhood and youth find their fulfillment in 
mature age, so the aspirations and hopes of 
youthful lovers find their fulfillment in the 
after years of marriage. It is only in a con- 
tinually expanding and maturing union of hus- 
band and wife that the realization is possible 
of such a love as Charles pictures to Angelina 
when he says : — 

" We '11 live together, like two neighbor vines, 
Circling our souls and loves in one another ! 
We '11 spring together, and we '11 bear one fruit ; 
One joy shall make us smile, and one grief mourn ; 
One age go with us, and one hour of death 
Shall close our eyes, and one grave make us happy." 

Foster. I am glad to hear you say so. But 



100 Talk at a Country House 

how long the world has taken to accept this 
faith ; how imperfectly does it now practice it, 
or even believe it ! Christ told his disciples that 
it would be found in the story of the creation 
of man ; it glimmers in the love of Jacob for 
Rachel ; the favorite allegory of the Hebrew 
prophets of their nation as the bride of Jeho- 
vah seeming to show that the ideal had some 
counterpart in actual life. Homer shows us 
the love of husband and wife in Hector and 
Andromache ; but in the days of Plato all rec- 
ognition of a relation between love and mar- 
riage seems utterly to have vanished. 

The Squire. Yes ; and how slowly and with 
what struggles has it been emerging through 
the ages of the new Christian civilization ! 
Socrates, or Plato for him, dreamed, as you 
say, of a purely ideal love, with no relation to 
actual life. The Christian Church tried long 
and earnestly to purify and carry into a spir- 
itual channel the passion of love, by making 
Christ or the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph or St. 
Catherine, or some other of the holy men and 
women who had been raised to sainthood, the 
objects of the passionate devotions of monks 
and nuns. I respect and admire the self- 
sacrifice and the devotion with which these 
monks and nuns gave themselves up to this 
spiritual love ; and I cannot doubt that they 
were helping to lay the foundations for a life 



Love and Marriage loi 

more really spiritual, because more in accord- 
ance with God's laws of human nature than 
their own. To some, indeed, it was given to 
realize their ideas of spiritual love. But they 
were, and still are, the exceptions. 

Foster. Do you think, then, that the poetic 
ideal of love, such as we have it in the lines you 
have just quoted from Beaumont and Fletcher, 
or as it stands in " John Anderson, my Jo," is in 
truth identical with the ideal of the Christian 
Church 1 

The Squire. I often think that in the marriage 
service which we have heard this morning, 
and especially in the marriage vows, our Eng- 
lish Church reformers have embodied the very 
ideals of love^ in itself, and in the married life. 
The words are homely enough, but there is a 
pathos, a depth of feeling in them, which can- 
not be greater. " I, Richard, take thee, Mary, 
to my wedded wife, to have and to hold 
from this day forward, for better for worse, for 
richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to 
love and to cherish, till death us do part, ac- 
cording to God's holy ordinance ; and thereto 
I plight thee my troth." If love be the giving 
one's self without reserve to another, and re- 
ceiving the like gift from that other, what words 
could express such love better than these ? 

Foster. Not even those of Sir Philip Sid- 
ney: — 



I02 Talk at a Country House 

** My true-love hath my heart, and I have his, 
By just exchange for one another given : 
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss, 
There never vizs, a better bargain driven : 
My true love hath my heart, and I have his. 

" His heart in me keeps him and me in one, 
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides; 
He loves my heart, for once it was his own, 
I cherish his because in me it bides : 
My true-love hath my heart, and 1 have his." 

The Squire. It is of the essence of love, 
that longing desire to share the joys and the 
troubles of life with the loved one, and the 
confident belief that we can so share the bur- 
dens and double the enjoyments of him or 
her whom we love ; and what words can say 
this better than "for better for worse, for 
richer for poorer, in sickness and in health " ? 
" To love and to cherish " in all those chances 
and changes, — the most ardent, most roman- 
tic lover cannot promise more; and happy is 
that man or woman who, at the end of a long 
married life, can say, though with many tender 
and even sad regrets, " I have kept my vows " ! 

Foster. Is it not said that in the old York 
Manual, in use before the Reformation, along 
with the vows as they now stand were the 
words "for fairer for fouler" ? 

The Squire. So Wheatley says. It is just 
what Moore says in the song beginning, — 

" Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, 
Which I gaze on so fondly to-day." 



Love afid Marriage 103 

The meaning is good in tiie quaint old phrase ; 
but it is not every one who can hear grave 
thoughts expressed in words of humorous 
oddity without an incongruous sense of the 
ridiculous, and therefore our reformers were 
right to omit them. 

Foster. There are two vows or promises 
which you have not noticed: the woman's vow 
to obey, and the man's declaration " with my 
body I thee worship." 

The Squire. They are the counterparts of one 
sentiment, that which we call the sentiment of 
chivalry. You always recognize that sentiment 
with prompt alacrity. The spontaneous and 
heartfelt reverence for woman, which we call 
chivalry is not given to all men, not even to 
all good men ; nor do all women seem to feel 
the need for it strongly, though no doubt all 
are pleased when such worship is shown them. 
I suppose it can never be wholly wanting in 
the love of the young ; but with some men it 
seems transient, and sometimes it degenerates 
into a foolish gallantry, or, still worse, into 
that detestable combination of outward respect 
and inward contempt which Lord Chesterfield 
held to be the proper attitude of a gentleman. 
But I know that you are, and will be till death, 
a true knight among ladies. Then as to the 
counterpart in the woman's vow of obedience. 
There are many forms and many degrees of 



I04 Talk at a Country House 

that obedience ; and every woman must judge, 
and every good woman will judge rightly, what 
these must be in her own case. You may 
study them all in Shakespeare, in every va- 
riety; no two alike, but all very beautiful. I 
will give you one, that of Portia, in "The Mer- 
chant of Venice," — Portia, the rich heiress, 
mistress of herself and her wealth, self-pos- 
sessed and self-asserting, whom we may sus- 
pect of being half conscious of her own 
intellectual superiority to the worthy and 
amiable man whom she has chosen to take 
for her husband, and of whom she makes fun 
with saucy boldness, while she is getting him 
and his friend out of a difficulty beyond their 
wit to cope with. This is how Portia gives 
herself to Bassanio i — 

" You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, 
Such as I am.: though for myself alone 
I would not be ambitious in my wish. 
To wish myself much better ; yet, for yoa 
I would be trebled twenty times myself ; 
A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times 
More rich ; 

That only to stand high in your account, 
I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends, 
Exceed account ; but the full sum of me 
Is sum of something, which, to term in gross, 
Is an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractised, 
Happy in this, she is not yet so old 
But she may learn ; happier than this, 
She is not bred so dull but she can learn ; 
Happiest of all is that her gentle spirit 



Love and Ma7'riage 105 

Commits itself to yours to be directed, 
As from her lord, her governor, her king. 
Myself and what is mine to you and yours 
Is now converted : but now I was the lord 
Of this fair mansion, master of my servants, 
Queen o'er myself ; and even now, but now, 
This house, these servants and this same myself 
Are yours, my lord : I give them with this ring ; 
Which when you part from, lose, or give away, 
Let it presage the ruin of your love 
And be my vantage to exclaim on you." 

The whole scene is, indeed, a perfect picture of 
true love, — love at once passionate and pure, 
as modest and as chaste as it is without reserve. 

Foster. Portia's words which you have re- 
peated remind me of the words with which 
the young Roman matron crossed the thresh- 
old of her husband's house and her future 
home, — "Ubi tu Caius, ego Caia." 

The Squire. Which Wheatley well trans- 
lates, " Where you are master, I am mistress." 
There is a proud humility in the words which 
well becomes the dignity of the Roman ma- 
tron. And no words could better sum up and 
describe that most charming among the things 
of daily life, the wife's unconscious faith and 
assertion that the home which she shares with 
her husband is as much and as really her 
own by right of marriage as it is his by in- 
heritance or by the work of his own hands. 
It is this twofold life, two beings and two lives 
in one, which makes a marriage and a home. 



io6 Talk at a Country House 

Foster. You remind me of the description 
of the Dauphin and the Lady Blanch in " King 
John:" — 

" If lusty love should go in quest of beauty, 
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanch? 
If zealous love should go in search of virtue, 
Where should he find it purer than in Blanch ? 
If love ambitious sought a match of birth, 
Whose veins bound richer blood than Lady Blanch? 
Such as she is, in beauty, virtue, birth. 
Is the young Dauphin every way complete : 
If not complete of, say he is not she ; 
And she again wants nothing, to name want, 
If want it be not that she is not he : 
He is the half part of a blessed man, 
Left to be finished by such as she ; 
And she a fair divided excellence, 
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him." 

I should be glad enough to believe heartily 
in the lastingness of all true love, whether on 
the authority of Shakespeare or any other. 
But does not Shakespeare mean Prospero to 
confess that even the holy love of Ferdinand 
and Miranda is but such stuff as dreams are 
made of ? 

The Squire. He charges himself with the 
petulance of old age while he so speaks. If he 
had really believed this, could he have said, 
when he saw how love was awaking in those 
young hearts, — « 

" So glad of this as they I cannot be. 
Who are surprised withal : but my rejoicing 
At nothing can be more " ? 



Love and Marriage 107 

He could not have rejoiced to lose his 
daughter, that most dear companion of his 
old age, for the sake of a dream. I do not 
pretend that all love, even when it has the 
signs of being true, is always lasting. It is 
too often choked, and perishes under the 
pleasures or the cares of the world. Yet, 
depend upon it, as you grow older you will see 
more and more instances and proofs of the 
reality and the depth of the love of husbands 
and wives for each other in the most ordinary, 
commonplace couples. I have heard of mar- 
riages where love has died out from some 
canker of selfishness or worldliness at its 
heart; but I have oftener seen unexpected 
proofs of a love stronger than death in all 
sorts of people in whom I had never before 
discovered any signs of sentiment or romance. 
Nor must we forget the many loving couples 
in whose case love has come after a marriage 
which seemed to have had no higher than 
prudential motives of one kind or another. 
Love, indeed, must be kept alive by love, — 
love deep in the heart, yet coursing through 
the minutest veins, and giving to every power 
of life a new and double power. Love must 
show itself living in the great occasions of life, 
in some supreme moment calling for mutual 
sympathy in a great joy or grief ; it must show 
itself in all the thousand little daily and hourly 



1 08 Talk at a Country House 

thoughtfulnesses, courtesies, and forbearances 
of common life. These things, the reflection 
of which we call good manners, the manners of 
the lady and the gentleman, should have with 
husband and wife a reality as of sunlight 
compared with moonlight. They alone can 
know and share these things in their fullness, 
and they should be to them as the atmosphere 
they breathe. And it is noticeable that in the 
old Marriage Service the bride's vow of obe- 
dience included a promise to be "buxom at 
bed and board," where the earlier sense of the 
word "buxom" as "obedient" is evidently 
meant to include the later one of good-hu- 
mored, genial obedience, as when Milton joins 
it with "blithe and debonair." I think the 
author of "Obiter Dicta" says that husband 
and wife should take care to have and to keep 
up a common interest in some subject of 
reading or action which they can always share 
together. It is good practical advice. To 
many it may be unnecessary, and especially 
to those who have children as the objects of 
their common love and care. I once heard a 
noble-minded lady say sadly, "We were very 
much in love with each other," speaking of 
the old days of courtship; and she added, 
" and it might all come back again if only he 
would show me some love." They were not 
selfish nor ungenerous, but their life was cold 



Love and Marriage 109 

and dreary because they had not learned 
rightly the arts of wedded love. A wise and 
prudent reserve in all other affairs of life is 
so right and needful that there is alwa3^s 
danger of its growing up in the one relation 
in which there should be no reserve ; and so 
it may grow and harden till it becomes an 
impassable barrier between the hearts that 
should be one. When Maurice was asked 
whether we shall know one another in the life 
to come, he answered, in his favorite Socratic 
fashion, with the further question, " Do we 
know one another here t " There is a strange 
perverseness of our nature by which we recoil 
from sympathy with ourselves at the very 
moment at which we are craving for that 
sympathy, and when to love and to be loved 
is the very thing we are longing for. I am 
thinking not of the great occasions and duties 
of married life, but of its little daily and 
hourly courtesies and endearments. They tell 
us that the great oak draws its nourishment 
and life not more through its main roots than 
through its countless minute fibres and threads 
which feed those main roots below and its 
countless leaves above. " To love and to 
cherish," — it is this sympathy in giving and 
receiving of souls that we cherish as well as 
love the object of our vows. When you marry, 
as I hope you will, do not forget the advice of 
an old man. 



, no Talk at a Country House 

Foster. You ought to know what you say; 
and I, as I said just now, am only too willing 
to believe it. Yet those awful words which we 
heard this morning haunt me, — " Till death 
us do part ! " 

The Squire. They are indeed awful ; as he 
knows best who has heard them at the grave- 
side echoed back in the words of another 
church service, — " Earth to earth, ashes to 
ashes, dust to dust." Cicero's Cato declares 
that he would not think life worth living if 
he did not believe that he should meet his 
lost son again among all the company of 
heaven, as his words might almost literally be 
translated. And if this was the faith of a 
heathen philosopher, much more may it be 
ours. If one grave is to make the lovers 
happy, — and Beaumont and Fletcher express 
a deeply rooted thought and sentiment in 
many hearts, — it must be because they look 
beyond that grave. The ballad of John An- 
derson is perfect in its kind, but I always like 
to think of it along v/ith its supplement in 
Lady Nairne's " Land o' the Leal." To sleep 
together at the foot of the hill which the old 
loving hearts had climbed together long years 
before is a pleasant thought, yet surely pleas- 
ant only to those who look to share the fast- 
coming joy of a waking from that sleep to be 
shared together in that better land. 



Love and Marriage 1 1 1 

" For if this earth be ruled by Perfect Love, 
Then, after his brief range of blameless days, 
The toll of funeral in an Angel ear 
Sounds happier than the merriest marriage-bell. 
The face of Death is toward the Sun of Life, 
His shadow darkens earth : his truer name 
Is ' Onward,' no discordance in the roll 
And march of that Eternal Harmony 
Whereto the worlds beat time, tho' faintly heard 
Until the great Hereafter, Mourn in hope ! " 

We had come into the house as the Squire 
repeated these lines half to himself. Then, 
going into his own room, he took from a 
drawer a book, which he opened, and pointed 
to the following words : — 

" When I think how these hands cared for 
me in sickness and in health, I feel that I 
shall press them to my heart again ; when I 
see, in memory, those lips which ever spoke 
in words of wisdom and comfort and tenderest 
love and trust, and those bright joyous eyes 
which to the last bended their light on me, I 
know that I shall most certainly behold that 
face and hear that voice again, — in the res- 
urrection. It cannot be otherwise. The ex- 
pression of such spirits, which is indeed their 
lifelong character stamping itself upon the 
outward form, can never die. 'There is a 
natural body, and there is a spiritual body,' 
says St. Paul." 

The Squire sat down in his armchair ; and 
we were silent for some time. Then I said, — 



112 Talk at a Country House 



" They are beautiful words : where do they 
come from ? " 

The Squire. They are slightly altered from 
Miss Bremer's " Homes of the New World." 
They express the thought, or rather let me say 
the conviction and the faith, summed up by 
Tennyson in the words, " We shall know them 
when we meet." 

Foster. Has not Tennyson opened a new 
road in literature, in what he writes so freely 
as to another life, or rather as to our life after 
death ? 

The Squire. I think this is so, if in your use 
of the word Literature you draw a line which 
shall put on one side Shakespeare, and on 
the other the New Testament, the Pilgrim's 
Progress, and all our Hymns of the Christian 
Church. 

Foster. That is what I meant ; but I see 
the great difficulty of doing anything of the 
kind. You may ask me whether I do not 
consider the writings of our great theologians 
to be a part of English literature, and I should 
hardly know what to answer. 

The Squire. No ; so far from wishing to push 
you into a corner, I think you are right. There 
is a real distinction, though it should be one 
of relationship, not of separation between our 
thoughts of this life and of that which is to 
come. Poets and men of letters deal princi- 



Love and Marriage 113 

pally with the one, and preachers and theo- 
logians with the other ; but Tennyson, while 
belonging to the former, has put himself in 
touch with the latter, with more openness and 
less of reticence than usual. Wordsworth was 
a sincere and devout Christian, but there is a 
striking difference between his great "Ode" 
and Tennyson's " In Memoriam." The Idea, 
the Motive, underlying Wordsworth's Ode is 
that Man has in him another and truer life 
than that of Nature, of which he has indica- 
tions in himself which seem like the recollec- 
tions of a divine Mind whence he has come ; 
while in Tennyson's poem the Master thought 
is going forward into a world to come. Con- 
versely, it has been said of Maurice, the 
greatest of the religious teachers of our gen- 
eration, that he dwells so naturally on the 
present reality of the life eternal that he 
sometimes seems to speak little of the future 
life everlasting. But the ideas are really inter- 
changeable, and he knows most of the one, 
to whom the other is best known, whichever 
he may find it his own vocation to speak upon. 
Foster. But there are good and thoughtful 
men w^ho heartily recognize the reality of a 
moral life above that of mere nature, and yet 
have no belief, but indeed a positive disbelief, 
of any continuance of this life beyond the 
grave t 



114 Talk at a Country House 

The Squire. As I often say to you, the world 
is full of mysteries which I cannot fathom. I 
have asked myself your question many times ; 
the only answer I find is that in the Gospel : 
" And His disciples asked Him, saying, Mas- 
ter, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that 
he was born blind ? Jesus answered. Neither 
hath this man sinned nor his parents : but that 
the works of God should be made manifest in 
him." He may have found his new experience 
worth the price of the old one when the Divine 
Word said, " Let there be light and there was 
light." 

Foster. Why does Shakespeare, who knew 
everything, say almost nothing about a future 
life ? Shakespeare's ghosts, like all the ghosts 
of actual life, are but the projected forms of 
the imagination of him who sees them, and 
tell nothing which he did not know already. 
"To sleep, perchance to dream," and to dream 
very uneasily, is all that Hamlet's philosophy 
can tell him of another life. And Constance 
can think of it only as a place where her child 
will not know her, but will be lost to her for- 
ever. 

The Squire. Shakespeare's business was to 
picture men and women as they are, in them- 
selves, and in their relations to each other. 
Shakespeare's men and women are not re- 
ligious people, but they are the men and 



Love and Marriage 1 1 5 

women of actual life. Like the greater part 
of actual men and women, they are not god- 
less, nor unbelieving either in the force of 
prayer or in the reality of a future life ; but 
they are mainly occupied with the affairs of this 
world, and its duties and its ambitions, its 
griefs and its enjoyments ; and their chief 
thought of death is that it is the rest from all 
these labors. 
Foster. 

" Fear no more the heat 0' the sun, 

Nor the furious winter's rages ; 

Thou thy worldly task hast done, 

Home art gone and ta'en thy wages ; " 



and 



Good-night, sweet prince, 

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." 



The Squire. Yes. But notice the words are 
those of one who never uses a word that is 
not the exact counterpart of the thought it 
expresses. In the passage you quote from 
Cymbeline, not only has the whole manifest 
reference to the Scripture words, " Blessed 
are the dead that die in the Lord henceforth, 
for they rest from their labours, and their 
works do follow them," but each word is sig- 
nificant of another life. A divine taskmaster, 
of tasks other than of this world, a home in 
v/hich shall be enjoyed the reward for work 
here done well — all these are plainly implied. 



ii6 Talk at a Country House 

Then, again, look at Horatio's farewell to 
Hamlet. The true commentary on that " Good- 
night " is Mrs. Barbauld's "Hymn of Life," 
of which Wordsworth said to a lady from 
whom the story comes down to me, that to 
have written that poem he would willingly 
have left half his own unwritten. You can 
repeat it — turning to his daughter who had 
joined us ; to which she answered : — 

" Life ! I know not what thou art, 
But know that thou and I must part ; 
And when, or how, or where we met, 
I own, to me 's a secret yet. 
Life ! we 've been long together, 
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather ; 
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear — 
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear ; 
— Then steal away, give little warning, 

Choose thine own time ; 
Say not Good-night — but in some brighter clime 
Bid me Good-morning." 

The Squire, Yes; "good-night" tells cer- 
tainly of "good-morning," with all the bright 
and glad thoughts which belong to the begin- 
ning of a new day. " Rest," too, does not less 
certainly imply renewal of life and strength 
to new work, because it has come to one 
weary from past overwork. And even in the 
interval of rest Hamlet is accompanied by the 
songs of angels. And among them we may 
be certain was Ophelia. She had become a 
"ministering angel," as Laertes was assured, 



Love mid Marriage 117 

and that she was still his sister, while he laid 
" her fair and unpolluted flesh " in the grave. 

Foster. But does Shakespeare mean all this ? 

The Squire. He says it all ; I do not pretend 
to know more than that. As I said just now, 
his men and women are not religious people ; 
he has no St. Francis nor Saint Teresa, no 
Thomas ^ Kempis, nor Madame Guion ; but 
he shows us real men and women, who think, 
feel, and act as real men and women for the 
most part do. 

Foster. You mean that only a few in any 
generation are called and have power given to 
them, consciously to look on the present life 
as the preparation for that which is to come. 

The Squire. Yes ; it is only in that way that 
I meant to speak of men and women as possibly 
not religious. It is not till the shades of 
Saturday night are falling that the thoughts 
of home and wages take the place of those of 
work and duty, even in good men and women. 
It is only in this sense that I would dare to 
say that men are not religious, and even so 
I do not pretend to know men's hearts, nor 
to doubt that in many a heart and mind lie 
thoughts and feelings too deep for words. I 
call a man religious who lives in habitual 
consciousness of his relation to God ; but the 
relationship itself is in fact infinitely deeper 
than the consciousness of it. 



ii8 Talk at a Country House 

Foster. 

" Dear child ! dear girl ! that walkest with me here, 
If thou appear untouch'd by solemn thought 
Thy nature is not therefore less divine ; 

" Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, 
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine, 
God being with thee when we know it not." 

The Squire. Yes ; or take, for instance, that 
speech of Portia which I quoted just now, in 
which there is not a word which can in this 
sense be called religious, and yet it implies 
throughout the Christian ideal of marriage as 
a divinely created and sanctioned bond. And 
so I think Shakespeare may be justified as 
true to nature, even to those who have the 
heartiest sympathy with Tennyson's " In Me- 
moriam." 

Foster. From what you have said of Shake- 
speare, I seem to get some light on a question 
that has always been a great puzzle to me, as 
I suppose it has been to many others both 
before and since Bishop Warburton : Why 
there is so little said by the writers of the Old 
Testament about a future life, although the 
subject must have been familiar to them in the 
form in which it was treated by their neigh- 
bors, the Egyptians. History shows us that 
the Eschatology — is not that the word t — 
of the Egyptians was not so favorable to the 
moral and intellectual growth and vigor of 



Love and Marriage 119 

national life, as was the simpler and almost 
negative faith of the Hebrews. Though there 
are passages in the Psalms of a more cheerful 
kind, the words of the pious Hezekiah as to 
the unknown world of the dead are at least as 
gloomy as those of the heroes of Homer and 
Virgil. 

The Squire. The Jews seem to have felt the 
uncertainties as to a future life no less than 
did the Greeks and Romans, who rose to such 
hopes as those of Plato and Cicero, or sank 
to the blank nothingness of Moschus or of 
Horace. It was that preaching of the Res- 
urrection which the Athenians thought the 
words of a babbler, which shifted the centre 
and pivot of man's life, and so gave birth to 
the Christian faith in a life eternal. 

Foster. And I suppose you will say that 
the change caused by the new faith is reflected 
in the popular imagination by the change from 
the descent into Pluto's gloomy realm across 
the Styx by help of Charon and his boat, to the 
crossing of the Jordan at the summons of the 
messengers whose raiment shone like gold and 
their faces as the light, and the going up to 
the Celestial City and into the presence of its 
King with chariots and horses and triumphal 
music, by Bunyan's pilgrims. 

The Squire. Yes. And I like to think that it 
was Bunyan's latest experience which led him 



Talk at a Country House 



to describe Christiana's passage of the River 
as one in which there was nothing but joy, 
without even that small measure of fear which 
Christian had for a moment felt, as the waters 
went over his head. I often think that that 
description of the arrival of the Messenger, 
and of Christiana's glad obedience to his sum- 
mons, is what I should wish to hear read to 
me in the hour when my own summons has 
come. 

But hark ! the bells have begun again. The 
friendly ringers who welcomed the bride and 
bridegroom to church in the morning are now 
speeding them on their going away. And this 
talk of ours, serious as it has become, is, I 
hope, not unfittingly rounded with the joyful 
and merry peal. 



VI. 



BOOKS : TENNYSON AND MAURICE. 

Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book. 

Carlyle. 

The man that is dear to God. 

Tennyson to Maurice. 

It was raining hard ; and as it is the fashion, 
in a country house, to Hke a fire on a wet day- 
even in summer, we sat before the logs blazing 
on the hearth in the Great Parlor, while in 
front of us sat purring the family cat, who an- 
swered, when he thought fit to answer, to the 
name of Jim. Books were all round us, and 
our talk naturally turned on them. I said, — 

'* Of all our English books existing and to 
come, how many will always live ? " 

The Squire. There are two ways in which a 
book may live. It may live, age after age, in 
itself, like one of our great oaks, as Carlyle 
has finely described it in " Sartor Resartus." I 
think the book is on the table : pray read the 
passage. 

Foster (takes the book, turns over the pages, 
and reads). " Wondrous, indeed, is the virtue 



Talk at a Country House 



of a true Book. Not like a dead city of 
stones, yearly crumbling, yearly needing re- 
pair ; more like a tilled field, but then a 
spiritual field : like a spiritual tree, let me 
rather say, it stands from year to year, and 
from age to age (we have Books that already 
number some hundred and fifty human ages) ; 
and yearly comes its new produce of leaves 
(Commentaries, Deductions, Philosophical, Po- 
litical Systems ; or were it only Sermons, Pam- 
phlets, Journalistic Essays), every one of which 
is talismanic and thaumaturgic, for it can per- 
suade men. O thou who art able to write a 
Book, which once in the two centuries or 
oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not 
him whom they name City-builder, and inex- 
pressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror 
or City-burner ! Thou too art a Conqueror 
and Victor, but of the true sort, namely, over 
the Devil ; thou too hast built what will outlast 
all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing 
city of the mind, a Temple and Seminary and 
Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the 
Earth will pilgrim. Fool ! why journeyest thou 
wearisomely in thy antiquarian fervor to gaze 
on the stone pyramids of Geeza or the clay 
ones of Sacchara? These stand there, as I 
can tell thee, idle and inert, looking over the 
Desert, foolishly enough, for the last three 
thousand years ; but canst thou not open thy 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 1 23 

Hebrew Bible, thus, or even Luther's version 
thereof?" 

The Squire. For " Luther's " read " the Eng- 
lish " and then add Shakespeare, and you will 
have one answer to your question. I cannot 
doubt that so long as English shall endure as 
the speech of a civilized people, so long will 
the English Bible and Shakespeare endure; 
and English-speaking people will still, like 
Archbishop Sharp, owe all their success in life 
to those two books. 

Foster. Did Archbishop Sharp know any- 
thing of either the English Bible or Shake- 
speare ? 

The Squire. Not the Archbishop of tragic 
Scottish history, but the Archbishop of York, 
Queen Anne's trusted counselor, who, Burnet 
tells us, so spoke of what he owed to the Bible 
and Shakespeare, and used to recommend the 
like studies to the young clergy. And Tenny- 
son is said to have advised a young man to 
read a verse of the Bible and one of Shake- 
speare every day. " From the one," he said, 
" you will learn your relations with God ; from 
the other, your relations with man." But there 
is another way in which books live. To illus- 
trate this, let me go from Carlyle to Chaucer: 

" Out of the olde fieldes, as men saith 

Cometh all this new com, from year to year. 
And out of olde bookes, in good faith, 
Cometh all this new science that men lere," 



124 Talk at a Country House 

Without working the illustration to death, we 
may say that, with a very few exceptions, the 
knowledge which we derive from books is not 
derived direct from the original books in which 
it was first brought forth, but from a succes- 
sion of new books, in which the experiences 
and the thoughts of the preceding generation 
are represented with the new developments 
and in the new forms suited to the new gen- 
eration. Each year yields its harvest of new 
books, which supply our mental and moral 
food for the day, and no more ; while a small 
portion of the knowledge they contain be- 
comes a reserve of seed corn, which is resown 
to provide the new books of the next year or 
the next generation. If we say, with Chaucer, 
that the new knowledge comes from the old 
books, as the new wheat does from the old 
fields, we must then shift the comparison, and 
say that the new books are the new corn, and 
that the old books have lost their individuality, 
ceasing to be more than the clods of the 
ploughed fields. 

Foster. I believe you might have quoted 
Carlyle as well as Chaucer for this comparison, 
too. I think he somewhere says, perhaps quot- 
ing Goethe, "A loaf of bread is good and 
satisfying for a single day ; but corn cannot 
be eaten, and seed corn must not be ground." 
But do you think that the Bible and Shake- 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 125 

speare are the only books which will them- 
selves live on so long as the world of civiliza- 
tion lasts ? Even within the limits of English- 
speaking civilization, will not Paradise Lost 
and The Pilgrim's Progress live on, not 
merely in spirit, but in their actual old forms ? 
The Squire. Since the art of printing has 
come in aid of the earlier institution of public 
libraries, it may seem impossible that any- 
thing short of an universal return to barbarism 
should utterly destroy the great masterpieces 
of literature, ancient or modern, so that they 
should no longer live in the very forms in 
which they were first given to the world. Yet 
we know that the readers of each of such 
books are a small and limited class ; and of 
these, again, the number is still smaller of 
readers who find in the particular book the 
last and the best expression of the subject of 
which it treats. Poetry must always be read 
for its own sake, and there will always be a 
few who will continue thus to read Homer 
and Horace, Dante, Chaucer and Spenser, for 
their own sake. But even of those who in 
each generation are really lovers of poetry, by 
far the greater number will seek and find what 
they want in the poets of their own time, 
because such poets most directly bring forth 
the deepest thoughts and feelings of that time ; 
while the reader of the older poetry must be 



126 Talk at a Country House 

able — and every one is not able — either to 
translate old thoughts into new for himself, or 
else to transport himself in imagination into 
the far-off time and place to which the book 
before him belongs. And when we turn from 
poetry to philosophy, history, or science, it is 
mainly, if not entirely, for the sake of the 
materials which the old books supply for mak- 
ing new ones that the old are studied. In 
each of these kinds of knowledge there is an 
absolute need that the old facts, arguments, 
and methods of thought and reasoning should 
be reproduced in new forms, generation after 
generation. To do this work, through the 
study of the oW books, is the calling of one 
or two men in each generation ; and they, and 
they only, find in themselves the ability for 
the work. Such a student will no doubt often 
be charmed by the style and language of the 
book itself, be it Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, 
Bacon, Tacitus, Hume, or Gibbon ; but his 
main business will still be with the materials 
which his author supplies for new work. 

Foster. I cannot deny that there is a good 
deal of truth in what you say ; but I am glad 
to believe that, like a man who belongs to 
several London clubs, I belong to several of 
those limited classes of readers of old books, 
and that there are a good many books beside 
the Bible and Shakespeare which I can read 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 127 

and enjoy for their own sakes. But may I 
ask you again whether you think those the 
only two books of universal interest to English- 
speaking men, at least ? Will you not include 
Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress with 
these, and indeed some others, too, which I 
could name ? 

T/ie Squire. I decline to dogmatize. I am 
too old to believe that I possess any formula 
which will methodize and explain the facts of 
the universe. I feel more certain about the 
Bible and Shakespeare than about any other 
books ; but there are others, and especially 
those you mention, as to which facts are at 
present in favor of their personal immortality, 
if I may use so vile a phrase. The religious and 
the human interest of Paradise Lost and The 
Pilgrim's Progress are of the highest, and you 
may almost say that every one who reads at 
all reads both of these books. Every one to 
whom the conflict of nature and spirit is a 
practical reality, and many to whom it is only 
a curiously interesting dream, find the most 
lifelike representation of this conflict in Bun- 
yan's allegory. And Milton embodies for us 
in forms at once of deepest human interest 
and perfect beauty of imagination, thought, 
and language, the most popular and most 
widely accepted attempt to solve the great 
problem of the existence of evil, and so 



128 Talk at a Cowitry House 

lighten the burden and the mystery which 
have weighed so heavily on us in all ages. 

Foster. That is indeed the awful riddle of 
the Sphinx, which she calls on every thought- 
ful man to answer, or be devoured. Happy is 
he who can even baffle or otherwise put off 
the question which no one can answer ! You 
cannot think that Milton has done more than 
this ? He invokes the highest inspiration, that 
he may rise to the height of this great argu- 
ment, and justify the ways of God to man ; 
but in truth he gets no further than St. Paul 
had done before him when he declared that 
those ways were past finding out. Indeed, 
Milton seems, half cynically, to admit this to 
be so, when, later on, he makes the more 
amiable of his devils sit on a hill retired, 
discussing these questions till they lose them- 
selves in wandering mazes. The answer that 
came to Job out of the whirlwind was only 
that finite and mortal man cannot fathom the 
purposes and the methods of the Almighty 
Creator of the universe ; nor does the writer 
of the book, in his visionary narrative, carry 
the argument any further. The book of Eccle- 
siastes, that practical summary of the worldly 
experiences of man's frustrated ideals and 
hopes of life, can give no other conclusion of 
the matter than the direction to "fear God 
and keep his commandments ; for this is the 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 129 

whole duty of man." Nor does St. Paul help 
us. He declares, indeed, with entire confi- 
dence and conviction, that the problem will 
hereafter be solved in the complete and abso- 
lute triumph of good over evil ; but after an 
attempt to apply his argument to the story of 
Pharaoh, in a way which I must think no 
argument at all, he gives it up, and falls back, 
as I said just now, on that which still re- 
mains the only answer. I forget how Robinson 
Crusoe evaded the difficulty when Friday asked 
him, in the course of his religious education, 
"Why God no kill devil?" I suppose, by 
making a metaphysical distinction between 
necessity and free will. Our modern Agnos- 
tics, interested only in physical science, will 
say that they do not know whether there be 
any God or devil, and so pass by on the other 
side. There is no answer to the Sphinx's 
riddle ; but to say that there is no riddle is 
to deny half the facts of our life. 

The Squire. I quite agree with you. In- 
deed, you have understated your case and its 
complications. Not only is the existence of 
evil a mystery to all who believe intelligently 
in a wise and good Creator, but there is the 
yet deeper mystery that all the higher forms 
of any human virtue, affection, sympathy, are 
called forth by the contradiction of corre- 
sponding forms of evil ; nay, the highest of 



130 Talk at a Country House 

all, self-sacrifice for the sake of others, seems 
to ov/e its very existence to the evil which it 
rises up to meet. A man may judge for him- 
self whether the sufferings of mind or body 
which he is called on to endure are compen- 
sated, or more than compensated, by the bless- 
ings which they have brought with them, and 
giving, as they so often do, a double power to 
every power above their original functions and 
offices. But how can it be morally worth 
while that the highest goodness and happiness 
of some men should have as necessary condi- 
tions not merely the suffering and misery of 
others, but even their crimes and sins ? And 
again, how can it be reasonable or right that 
my happiness, however great, should have been 
bought by the horrible sufferings of the mar- 
tyrs by whom it has been so won ? You may 
say that they were willing to pay that price for 
the happiness of a world. I believe they were 
so willing ; but how can I have any moral right 
to benefit by a sacrifice such as I certainly 
could not make myself? I have no doubt — 
I am heartily convinced — that there is a solu- 
tion to the problem, an answer to the Sphinx ; 
and I could supply myself with more than one 
fanciful explanation which I like better than 
those of my neighbors. But I do not pretend 
to understand, nor that any understanding is 
possible for me till I have crossed the bar. 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 131 

Foster. You quote Tennyson : do you think 
he has given us any new light on the subject ? 
It has manifestly occupied his deepest thoughts 
and feelings, and influenced his whole career 
as a poet. 

The Squire, I think he is the greatest 
teacher of our generation in this matter. He 
has stated the question in the most complete 
and adequate way in which it is possible to 
state it, — for our generation, at least ; for each 
age has it own way of looking at such ques- 
tions, and demands its own requirements to be 
respected. His " In Memoriam " sets out fully, 
and his poem of " Vastness " and that on the 
death of the Duke of Clarence sum up in the 
plainest terms, the real problem, without any 
shirking or evasion. With equal clearness he 
points out the direction to which he must look 
for the solution which will come hereafter ; 
and he declares, and calls on all true hearts to 
accept, his conviction that the death of those 
we love is the link which connects the now 
insoluble problem with the promise that it 
shall be one day answered. 

Foster. Yes ; Tennyson states the insoluble 
problem without reticence or rhetorical eva- 
sion. He talks no stuff about partial evil be- 
ing universal good, or of good and evil being 
opposite sides of a whole, in which they are 
equally necessary complements of each other. 



132 Talk at a Country House 

He treats them as not merely opposites, but as 
contradictory. There is no place for evil in 
his ideal of a perfect universe. There can be 
no belief in a divine Creator, and no peace or 
happiness for the heart of man, but in the 
ultimate elimination and destruction of all evil, 
moral and physical. But does he carry us any 
farther than this ? 

The Squire. One step, at least ; and I should 
say more than one. It is from Death — " his 
truer name is Onward," he says — that Tenny- 
son draws the promise of the solution here- 
after. The great argument which he gradually 
opens out in " In Memoriam " he sums up again 
in the concluding words of "Vastness : " — 

" I loved him, and love him forever : the dead are not dead, 
but alive." 

That is to say that the love which he bore to 
his friend, and again to his son, did not die 
with their deaths, but still lives, and will live 
forever. This undying love is to him a witness 
that its object is actually living, too, in spite 
of what Death may seem to say to the con- 
trary. For that apparent contradiction is but 
the shadow, while the reality is to be found in 
the Sun of Life towards which Death's face is 
looking. And if this experience, this convic- 
tion, be true, and if there is a love and a life 
stronger and more lasting than death, then 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 133 

there is a Lord of Life who rules all this world 
by perfect love. When we have gone into that 
world of light, then and there the mystery will 
be made clear. 

Foster. He has crossed the bar, and put 
out to sea on that voyage of discovery : let us 
hope that he has found his Pilot in the ship, 
able and ready to carry him to the harbor 
where he would be. 

The Squire. I cannot doubt it. It is pleas- 
ant to think how often that image of a voyage 
and a harbor has presented itself to all sorts of 
men. Cicero makes Cato, after speaking of 
this life as a mere inn, compare that future 
life, to which he so earnestly looked forward, 
to the harbor at the end of the voyage. Sa'di, 
quoting, I think, from the Koran, says, " He 
who has Noah for a pilot need not fear the 
waves of the sea." And if you will forgive the 
garrulousness of an old man, I may add a 
little experience of my own, which comes back 
to me as often as I recall Tennyson's verses 
on " Crossing the Bar." 

Foster. What is that ? 

The Squire, In the old days before there 
were any railways in Italy, most of us who went 
to Naples w^ent by way of steamer from Mar- 
seilles ; and it was at the end of November, 
seven-and-thirty years ago, that I took passage 
in such a steamer. All day there had raged 



134 Talk at a Country House 

one of those gales of wind and rain which 
sweep the plains of Provence and the Gulf of 
Lyons with such terrible fury. But no delay 
more than of a few hours was possible, and 
we were required to embark at midnight. The 
water seemed smooth as we went into the 
ship in the port; but as we crossed the bar 
and put out to sea, the leap into the utterly 
black night of wind and waves and rain was 
terrific. I could not see our pilot face to face ; 
but I knew that he was there through all that 
long night and day, and that on his skill it 
depended whether we should reach the harbor 
where we would be. At last I slept, while the 
storm still raged. When I awoke we were in 
smooth water, through which our ship was 
gliding on with an imperceptible motion, along 
that lovely scene of mountains and islands, 
and vineyards, orange orchards, and olive 
woods, which open out into the Bay of Naples. 
The day was breaking, the sun was rising 
upon that land of beauty, and the cloudless 
depth of the blue sky was reflected in the not 
less intense blue of the sea. 

Foster. I know that sight, and cannot won- 
der that the Neapolitans themselves should 
call it a piece of heaven fallen upon earth, or 
say that he who has seen it may die content. 
But you said just now that Tennyson is our 
greatest teacher in the matter of the Sphinx's 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 135 

riddle : do you put him above Frederick Mau- 
rice, of whom you often speak as the greatest 
teacher of our generation ? 

The Squire. No. Each stands first in his 
own plane of thought and life ; but I should 
rather put them side by side than either above 
the other. Each learnt, and knew that he 
learnt, much from the other. Each of them — 
the poet and the prophet alike — felt and knew 
himself to be a man sent from God, and that 
the calling and the mission of both were 
essentially the same. Maurice was primarily 
a teacher of the gospel j but while he never 
ceased to declare the good tidings of a King- 
dom of God in and for itself, he recognized 
its pervading presence in every form and every 
relation of man's life, to which it gave a new 
and higher worth and meaning. Tennyson, 
on the other hand, shows us earth and man 
as they are in themselves, with all their com- 
plications and interfusions of good and evil, 
happiness and misery, vice and virtue, and 
then finds himself obliged — drawn as it were 
by an irresistible intuition — to look out of 
and above this earth for a clue through its 
contradictions into a true order. 

Foster. Certainly it is so. Few of the 
greatest poets, in any age or country, have 
been irreligious ; most have been religious, 
recognizing a government of the world by God. 



136 Talk at a Country House 

But even among Christian poets of the higher 
order of genius, I can think of no one who 
rests on the faith of another hfe than this 
so distinctly as Tennyson does. To eUminate 
this faith from Tennyson's poetry would in- 
deed be to reduce it to dust and ashes. What 
would " In Memoriam " or the parting of 
Arthur and Guinevere, " Crossing the Bar " or 
" The Two Voices," be without it ? 

The Squire. You see this distinction if you 
compare Wordsworth with Tennyson. Words- 
worth was a Christian in faith as well as life, 
and his mind was formed in and through the 
great burst of enthusiastic belief in the per- 
fectibility of human nature to which all gen- 
erous spirits gave themselves up in the later 
years of the eighteenth century. In many 
respects he shared to the full in the general 
reaction which followed on the excesses of 
the French Revolution ; he became a Tory, 
and he wrote the " Ecclesiastical Sonnets." 
But his mind retained much of its first bias. 
You see this in "The Excursion," where, while 
admitting and allowing for the moral and the 
bodily ills of the society and the human nature 
generally around him, he looks forward to 
universal education of the people by the state 
as the sufficient remedy for all the evil. We 
have the education, and it is well worth 
having ; but I suppose few expect from it 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 137 

now what Wordsworth expected. I, at least, 
look with Tennyson for a remedy different in 
kind, and not merely in degree. 

Foster. Was Maurice a man of letters as 
well as a theologian ? 

The Squire. He would have liked to be 
called a man of action better than by either of 
the other names. But he was a true lover of 
books, and he always seemed to me to know 
everything about every book and every writer 
of books, in his own day or in times past. 
His literary culture was greater than that of 
most men, — you see the evidence of this in 
every one of his books ; and I believe that 
he who himself knows most of other men's 
books will know most of the use which Mau- 
rice made of books, not as mere storehouses 
of facts or thought, but as supplying the mem- 
ory and mind with a knowledge and a culture 
which were all his own. But with him liter- 
ature and literary culture were means to an 
end, and not the end itself. He always spoke 
with scornful contempt of the fine gentlemen 
of letters ; and you may remember a letter of 
his to a pupil, — with whom, by the bye, he 
had been reading Plato, — urging him to make 
politics the main study of his life. 

Foster. But I suppose he was a political 
philosopher rather than a politician ? 

The Squire. He would not have thanked 



1 38 Talk at a Country House 

you for telling him so. He would indeed have 
told you that philosophy being the search after 
wisdom, politics, like everything else, should 
be an object of that search. But he despised 
the habit of mind which affects to rise above 
party politics while really sinking below them. 
He was a keen and eager politician on all the 
great questions of the day, though he was 
sometimes on one side and sometimes on the 
other. The earliest of his tracts in political 
controversy was in defense of university sub- 
scription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, but he 
was found in hearty sympathy with Lord John 
Russell's abolition of all such tests. He was 
a leader in the struggle to keep the education 
of the nation in the hands of the Church, but 
he heartily approved Mr. Forster's Education 
Act. He recognized that the time had come 
for the disestablishment of the Irish Church, 
notwithstanding his filial love for the like 
institution in England. And while I recall his 
predicting to me, more than fifty years ago, 
and with warm political sympathy, the future 
eminence of the then unknown but strong 
conservative Mr. Gladstone, I recall also his 
appearance, thirty years afterwards, as the 
supporter of John Mill, the radical candidate 
for Westminster. These are brief instances of 
what the man was ; and all through, no one 
who knew him could doubt either his honesty 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 139 

or his consistency, as he looked in succession 
at the many ways in which the progress of the 
world was fulfilling itself. 
Foster. 

" We might discuss the Northern sin 
Which made a selfish war begin ; 

Dispute the claims, arrange the chances ; 
Emperor, Ottoman, which shall win : 

" Or whether war's avenging rod 
Shall lash all Europe into blood." 

The Squire. I always thought that Tenny- 
son and Maurice lost their heads a little over 
the Crimean war, as most other people did ; 
and I have therefore been inclined to suppose, 
though without any authority for doing so, 
that when the excitement was over they looked 
back on it, as did Lord Aberdeen, the minister 
who let us drift into it, as not only a blunder, 
but a crime. 

Foster. Yet I have heard German statesmen 
say that they owe to that war the loosening 
from their necks of the yoke of Russian policy 
and diplomacy under which they had so long 
groaned. 

The Squire. No doubt some good was done 
in that way, but they would not touch the 
roasting chestnuts with their own fingers. 

Foster. Well, at least the war gave us *' The 
Charge of the Light Brigade;" and though I 
do not mean to compare Sir Francis Doyle with 



I40 Talk at a Country House 

Tennyson, perhaps one might say his no less 
fine ballad upon the same subject. 

The Squire. They are fine ballads, and 
bring out finely the English soldier's ideal of 
duty as the rule of his life. But those who, 
like me, remember the sufferings not only of 
the army through that terrible winter, but also 
of the wives and mothers at home, may think 
the price high, even for two such songs. 

Foster (humming half to himself). 

" If I were King of France, 

Or, still better, Pope of Rome, 
I 'd have no fighting men abroad, 
No weeping maids at home." 

But, Squire, are you really for peace at any 
price ? I remember what you once wrote in 
approval of the extermination of the Canaan- 
ites by the children of Israel and of the sol- 
dier's duty, taught not only at the Pass of 
Thermopylae, but in the Balaclava charge. 

The Squire. No, not at any price, but at 
almost any price, as Sir John Lubbock said 
the other day in the House of Commons. For 
every nation there exists a real danger of 
attacks, from within or without, on its laws 
and liberties ; and it is not only its right, but 
its duty, to defend itself, and sometimes its 
weaker neighbors too, against such attacks. If 
we cannot keep our national life, with its laws 
and its freedom, without war, let us have war; 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 141 

but let us not go into it "with a light heart," 
talking glibly of honor and spirit on the one 
hand, and of humiliation and shop-keeping 
on the other. I am old enough to remember 
when even many a wise and good man talked 
that sort of stuff about dueling, and really 
believed that it was a moral duty to shoot, or 
be shot by, any ruffian who called him a liar 
or struck him. No one says or thinks that 
now, and ruffianism has abated, not increased, 
in proportion. 

Foster. Is it not the fact that all the great 
nations of the world, modern as well as an- 
cient, have had their foundations laid by war, 
and that they have been from time to time 
enlarged and strengthened and invigorated by 
means of war, and all this in such a way that 
we cannot conceive how the results could have 
been brought about except by war ? 

The Squire. As I said just now, I do not 
deny the existence of evil, nor the still more 
mysterious fact that it is inconceivable how 
many of the highest forms of moral good could 
have been brought into existence except by 
means of evil. I neither understand nor deny, 
but I will not call evil good for all that. War 
has brought into existence soldiers like Chau- 
cer's "Knight," Wordsworth's "Happy War- 
rior," and Schiller's "Max Piccolomini ;" but 
they have been but few in comparison with 



1 42 Talk at a Country House 

the countless swarms of ruffians licensed for 
murder, robbery, and lust. And free as the 
German army was from all these crimes in the 
late Franco-German war, it is said that after 
the war was over there was an increase in 
crime throughout Germany which could be 
explained only by the general demoralization 
which the war had produced. 

Foster. The other day you quoted from the 
Persian poet Sa'di that it had been said that, 
in the last great day, the All-Merciful would 
forgive the bad for the sake of the good ; but 
now you seem to hold that all the good must 
be condemned on account of the bad. I think 
of what the world would have been in the past 
and present, and what the world would be in 
the future, with no England and no United 
States, and I ask myself whether too high a 
price was paid for these in the Anglo-Saxon 
and Norman conquests, the wars of the barons 
and of the king and Parliament, or in the 
American wars of independence and emancipa- 
tion. 

The Squife. With reservation of Friday's 
theological difficulty, I agree with you not only 
ungrudgingly, but with hearty sympathy. I 
believe the price was not too great. But was 
the price necessary in the past, and will it be 
so in the future ? I say, Yes, men being what 
they were ; but, No, men being what they 



Books: Tennyson and Maurice 143 

ought to be and well may be now. It is better 
to do a good thing badly than not to do it at 
all ; but it is better still to do it well. We talk 
too much about necessary evils, and think too 
little of necessary good ; forgetting that all 
good is possible, and that in every case what 
is possible is necessary. In this matter of war, 
as in so many other things, successive genera- 
tions, advancing in the possession of ever fuller 
national life, with its rights and liberties, find 
many necessary evils to be unnecessary, and 
much more impossible good to be possible. 
And so, if you will grant the evils of war, and 
I its good, we may be able, like Dogberry and 
Verges, to "draw to a point." 

Foster. Did Maurice change or modify his 
views on this subject t 

The Squire. He has discussed this question 
of war in the eleventh of his Cambridge Lec- 
tures on Social Morality, published in 1869, to 
which I would refer you. But I can tell you 
a little incident, trivial in itself, yet perhaps 
interesting when told of a great man. No one 
shared more eagerly than did Maurice in the 
outbreak of enthusiasm with which the war 
was hailed at first. When I ventured to doubt 
the righteousness of the war, he declared, with 
indignation, that only the Spirit of God could 
stir up and maintain such a national enthusi- 
asm as the English people were then showing. 



144 T^^k at a Country House 

I suppose we agreed to differ, and not to 
argue. I do not think I asked him what he 
thought of that to me pathetic account of the 
regiments of Russian conscripts having hardly 
arrived at the seat of war from very distant 
parts of the empire when, at two o'clock in the 
morning of that cold day of November, all the 
church bells of Sevastopol rang out, and these 
men, having received the sacrament, went to 
die for their Czar in the lines of Inkerman. 
But after the war was over, I was breakfasting 
with Maurice, and there met a man who told 
the story of the Balaclava charge as he had 
lately heard it from one of the officers in it. 
He said the cursing and swearing of the 
troopers as they rode into and out of the 
Russian battery were awful. And I guessed 
what thoughts might be passing through my 
friend's mind when he said, with that quiet 
and almost sad seriousness which so often 
characterized his words and manner, " I am 
afraid many things in that war happened 
differently from what we supposed," — or 
words to that effect. 

Foster. I should have thought, as I now 
think, of Uncle Toby and his account of our 
soldiers in Flanders. I think, too, of the tear 
of the recording angel. The poor fellows were 
doing their duty, and their profane swearing 
did not mean much more than any other form 



Books : Ten?iyson and Maurice 145 

of battle shout. I do not recollect the men- 
tion of shouting in modern stories of battles, 
but soldiers do shout in a charge, do they not? 
The Squire. Sir William Napier, the his- 
torian of the Peninsular war, told a cousin of 
mine, Charles BuUer, that it was the British 
shout which carried the day in our great bat- 
tles ; nothing could withstand it. Of course, 
the shout is the man ; he utters what is in him. 
I remember that Marshal MacMahon, when 
comparing the soldiers of different nations, 
said, "The English do not understand cam- 
paigning, but they are the best on the day of 
battle." We have wandered far, however, and 
I do not wish you to think that when my dear 
old friend and I met, either in this house or in 
his own, our talk was of nothing but soldiers. 
With him as with Tennyson, he would always 

" turn to dearer matters, 
Dear to the man that is dear tc God ; 

" How best to help the slender store, 
How mend the dwellings of the poor ; 

How gain in life, as life advances, 
Valor and charity more and more." 

Foster. Yet there is something of the sol- 
dier's desire for action implied in the poet's 
description in those words ; and I can fancy 
that with Maurice the heart of the man of 
thought would always warm to the man of 
action. 



146 Talk at a Country House 

The Squire. Yes ; Maurice must have under- 
stood how Luther — with whom he had, indeed, 
many points of likeness — felt when he was 
going into the Diet of Worms, and the old 
soldier, Georg von Freundsberg, called out to 
him, " Monk, monk, you have before you such 
a day's work as neither I nor our bravest cap- 
tains have seen in our hardest fought battles. 
But if your cause is just, go forward boldly : 
God will not forsake you." Maurice wrote two 
books which will live, for they are full of 
learning, thought and genius, — " The King- 
dom of Christ," and "Moral and Metaphysical 
Philosophy ; " but he expressed the temper of 
his whole life when he once said to me that a 
man might bring greater honor to his name by 
writing a great book, — I think he instanced 
Gibbon, — yet that he believed more real work 
was done in the world by having a part in, 
and writing on, the actual controversies of the 
day in which men were taking a practical 
interest. And though it was after he said this 
that he wrote the two books I have mentioned, 
you may see by the number, and still more by 
the subjects, of the many volumes of his col- 
lected works how fully he carried out through 
his life the principles he had laid down for 
himself. 

Foster. Is Dickinson's portrait like him ? 

The Squire, I think so, but it is difficult 



Books : Tennyson and Maurice 1 47 

to know how far I may be reading into it my 
own recollections of the man himself. There 
it is, and you may try it by my description. 
His face was very fine and delicate in feature ; 
the expression was saintly, though not quite 
the ascetic saintliness which characterizes 
some of the portraits of great men of the 
Roman Catholic Church ; it was rather tinged 
with the sweet, homely humorousness which 
you see in Cranach's portrait of Luther. The 
eyes were bright and piercing, and the mouth 
was firm and compressed. The whole expres- 
sion of the face was energetic, almost aggres- 
sive, and yet kind and gentle : it was the look 
of a man who had a message to give, and who 
was resolved to give it; but the resoluteness 
had more of self-sacrifice than of self-assertion 
in it. 

Foster. You spoke of a humorous expres- 
sion. Was he a humorist t 

The Squire. You could not be long in his 
company without seeing how strong his sense 
of humor was ; but, like every man of humor 
who is wiser and better than a humorist, he 
kept his love of humor within the limits of 
becoming mirth ; nay, within limits which were 
habitually serious, often almost to sadness. 

Foster. He had a fine voice, had he not ? 

The Squire. A grand, deep voice, well fitted 
to pour out the volume of thought and feeling 



148 Talk at a Country House 

behind it. Bunsen said to hear him read the 
prayers at Lincoln's Inn, where he was chap- 
lain, was in itself to hear a sermon ; and some 
one else said, still more expressively, that he 
prayed the prayers. I remember the out- 
spoken delight of one of the cottagers as we 
came out of the church here when Maurice 
had been preaching. It reminded me of the 
story of the learned Pococke, of which he 
(Maurice) was fond : that when a friend, visit- 
ing him at his country parish, asked one of 
the villagers how they liked their new parson, 
the answer was, " He is not much of a Latiner, 
but he tells us what we poor folks want to 
know about God and Jesus Christ." 

Foster. Nullum tetegit quod non ornavit, 
— would you say that of his conversation gen- 
erally ? 

The Squire. He was shy and retiring, — a 
Iamb among the lions, as a lady described him 
at a great party of Mrs. Charles Buller's. He 
was free from the foible of omniscience attrib- 
uted to one of his Cambridge contemporaries, 
and far above the vanity of the good talker. 
But no one could listen to him for five minutes 
without perceiving that no ordinary man was 
speaking. In serious controversy and with 
his pen in his hand he hit very hard. I used 
to tell him that he reminded me of a story of 
his own, how, when he was a young curate, he 



Books: Tennyson and Maurice 149 

stopped in the High Street in Leamington to 
remonstrate with a man who was belaboring 
his donkey furiously, when the man replied 
in an appealing voice, " Why is he so stupid, 
then ? " 

Foster. What does Tennyson refer to in 
those lines at the beginning of his " Invita- 
tion," about giving the fiend his due, and the 
anathemas of college councils ? 

The Squire. You will find the whole story 
in Colonel Maurice's admirable life of his 
father ; but it was, shortly, this : Maurice de- 
nounced the irreligious spirit of the so-called 
religious newspapers, and they retaliated by 
not only denouncing him, but also warning 
the authorities of King's College that they 
had better dismiss him from his professorship 
of divinity in that college. A packed council 
was convened, a lately published essay in 
which the professor had "given the fiend his 
due " was made the pretext, and Maurice was 
dismissed, in the face of the clearest evidence 
that he had maintained nothing contrary to 
the acknowledged doctrines of the English 
Church. Maurice was one of the very few 
men whom I have known as lovers of justice 
for its own sake ; yet he got little justice him- 
self on that occasion. But the rain is over ; 
let us take a walk, and leave Jim to keep his 
paws warm at the fire. 



VII. 

RIDING DOWN TO CAMELOT. 

The Knight's bones are dust, 
And his good sword rust : — 
His soul is with the saints, I trust. 

Coleridge. 

The Squire was from home for a day or 
two, on business. When he came back, he 
asked the ladies, " What have you been doing 
while I was away ? " They answered, " We 
took Mr. Foster to Camelot, to convince him 
that it was Cadbury in Somersetshire, and not 
Winchester, which he declared Caxton to have 
said it to be." 

The Squire. Caxton was a wise as well as 
a good man, and his knowledge was great; 
but even he did not know everything. In the 
Introduction to the Globe Edition of " Morte 
Darthur" you will find the reasons for holding 
that King Arthur's Camelot — probably from 
Camelus, the Celtic god of war — was the 
Cadbury Castle you saw yesterday. But per- 
haps you are already convinced that you had 
seen the true Camelot, and that Arthur really 
held his court there ? 



Riding down to Camelot 151 

Foster. Certainly. I felt like Mopsa, who 
loved a ballad in print, because then she knew 
it to be true. 

The Squire. I should like to hear your 
account of the expedition. I know you keep 
a journal. 

Foster (fetches a notebook, and reads from 
it). " We got to Sparkford at about one 
o'clock on a day of terrible midsummer heat ; 
from there we drove to South Cadbury, about 
two miles off. The drive was across a plain ; 
in fact, the end of the great valley which runs 
up from the sea, roughly speaking, bounded 
by the Mendip range on one side, and the 
Polden hills, parallel to Mendip, on the other, 
and the beginning of the downs which join on 
to the system of Salisbury Plain, shutting in 
the valley at right angles to Mendip and the 
Polden Hills. In this great trench are islands : 
near the sea, such ones as Brent Knoll ; fur- 
ther up, Glastonbury Tor; and furthest from 
the sea, and just under the downs, lies Cam- 
elot. As we drove, we could see, looking 
towards our right, the downs bounding the 
horizon with their characteristic slopes, the 
flat tops and steep sloping sides and general 
plainness of surface which give to downs an 
individuality among hills. Along their ridges 
were to be seen scars on their sides, showing 
old encampments. Close under these downs 



152 Talk at a Country House 

stands Camelot. a long, regularly sloped hill, 
quite isolated, its top at a distance looking 
nearly horizontal, while the two ends present 
a slope of about the same angle ; the side 
towards us was thickly wooded, and so no 
ramparts were to be seen. At South Cadbury, 
a pretty village, with its little church and 
pollard poplar-trees round it, we began our 
walk. A narrow lane, with steep banks, lead- 
ing out of the highroad, and called Castle 
Lane, began to go up the hill. After a short 
distance we reached a gate : here the lane 
widened, and seemed to go straight up the hill 
in a broad ditch. A short way up, roads 
branched to right and left ; on the one to the 
left was a gamekeeper's cottage. These branch- 
ing roads were, in fact, the first ditches at the 
top of the first slope of earthwork. Before 
telling of our ascent of the fort, I will describe 
the general lines on which the defenses are 
made, as this will simplify the account I am 
going to give of the details. Imagine to your- 
self a plain out of which rises a hill, two 
hundred feet high of regular shape; on the 
northern side a slight slope up from the plain 
suddenly turns into a steep rampart of about 
fifty feet, so steep that we, like Camden, found 
it easier to run down it than walk. Gaining 
the top of this first rampart, you find 3^ourself 
on a narrow edge, sloping steeply down to a 



Riding down to Camelot 153 

ditch, a slope of perhaps ten feet ; from the 
bottom of this ditch rises the second rampart, 
of about the same height as the first, which 
again ends in an edge sloping down to a 
second ditch, from which rises the third ram- 
part, like the second, but not so high as the 
first and second, though as steep ; this, too, 
has its ditch, and from it rises the fourth and 
last rampart. The top of this one is embanked 
about ten feet above the nearly flat top of the 
hill. This is a space of some twenty acres, 
and at the eastern end enters the roadway 
leading up from the bottom to where I have 
said we first began to climb, the roadway 
cutting through ditches and ramparts. This 
entrance was, no doubt, protected by the iron 
gates which still live in tradition. So the road 
enters the oval top of the hill at the eastern 
end. Opposite, at the western end, another 
road just like this one comes up from the 
bottom ; a little to the north of this western 
gate the ground rises in a knoll, called Arthur's 
Castle, and is the highest part of the hill, 
being five hundred feet above the sea. It has 
steep sides, which seem partly the result of 
art, and partly natural. 

*'One could not help being struck by the 
simple earth walls and their primitive strength, 
and feeling how different must have been the 
people who lived here in rude strength from 



154 Talk at a Country House 

the gorgeous images of the Camelot of Malory. 
How entirely the life here must have differed 
from the mediaeval surroundings from which 
he drew his color ! And we could not help 
wondering who were the people who began to 
make a fortress out of the hill, and what were 
the names of those who had brought these 
earth mounds and ditches to such perfection 
of strength. Strange that the genius that 
planned and the energy that executed should 
have left only the work accomplished, and no 
record of those by whose might it was framed ! 
Strange that a people so great, who could 
carve the everlasting hills into citadels, and 
whose mounds and ditches have survived * the 
drums and tramplings of three conquests,'^ 
should have left no name even in the histories 
of nations now dead ! 

" * But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scat- 
tereth her poppy, and deals with the memory 
of men without distinction to merit of perpetu- 
ity. Who can but pity the founder of the 
Pyramids ? Herostratus lives that burnt the 
temple of Diana ; he is almost lost that built 
it.'i 

The greater part of the hill is wooded. 
This, unfortunately, hides the ramparts and 
ditches, except at close quarters, but then 
they are seen clearly. We made our way up 

1 Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial. 



Riding down to Camelot 155 

through the eastern entrance, walked across 
the oval top, and went out at the western gate 
down the hill to the bottom, where we found a 
wall below the last rampart shutting in the hill 
from the fields round. We then walked round 
the northern slope inside this wall, in search 
of the Wishing Well. After going a little way, 
the Squire's daughter saw a cow " — 

The Squire (interrupting). And you all ran 
for your lives, I suppose ? 

Foster. No, we did not. The young lady 
only availed herself, as her father would have 
done, of the opportunity for the exercise of the 
higher criticism, as you will see if you let me 
go on, — " saw a cow on the top of the first 
rampart above us (here not very high), and 
thought this might indicate water. We went 
to the place only to find a muddy pool, and 
were thinking of going on farther, when the 
other lady of the party, her sister-in-law, no- 
ticed, a little to the right of the pool, a few 
steps above it, a small inclosure some twenty 
feet square, made by a low, dry wall ; going 
into this, she found the well. The second 
rampart slopes up at the back of the little 
inclosure, making one of its walls ; in its side, 
on the ground, is the Wishing Well. A block 
of stone, about four feet long, has been hol- 
lowed out into a circular arch, the inside of 
which is cut into a scallop shell ; this block 



156 Talk at a Country House 

might be the top part or roof of a semich-cular 
niche, though here it rests on no pillars, but 
the ground, so the opening is only some two 
feet high and three long; the surface of the 
water was about a foot below the ground, in a 
little basin built, apparently, of brick, on the 
same plan as the scalloped roof, — that is, in 
front straight, the back a half-round. The 
water was as clear as crystal, and of icy cold- 
ness. Although the shape of the stone was 
evidently not very old, possibly of the time of 
Queen Anne, as it is sometimes called Queen 
Anne's Well, still, here it seemed a living 
thing of the past. The soft gurgle of the 
spring, as it ran away in some hidden channel, 
heard only when one bent close to the water, 
made one feel it was thus that this spring ran 
when those ramparts over our heads, now 
slumbering in peaceful decay, had resounded 
to the busy life of a capital city of the old 
British kingdom, or had echoed to the battle 
cry of a mightier race, the torrent of whose 
conquest this citadel had stayed, but not 
arrested. Not only did the well put us in 
touch with ' the clouded forms of long past 
history,' but we also thought of those whom 
poets have made much clearer. 

" ' Feigned of old or fabled since, 
Of faery damsels met in forest wide 
By Knights of Logres or of Lyones, 
Lancelot of Pelleas or Pellenore.' 



Riding down to Camelot 157 

For, at Camelot, Arthur and his knights still 
ride at the full moon and water their horses at 
this well. The hill of ramparts and ditches 
rose in the imagination to something much 
more than a stockaded camp of a savage tribe, 
and, like Leland before us, we felt that we 
were at the local habitation of those airy no- 
things, those fancies of poets' brains, King 
Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, 
whose deeds had played as important a part 
as had Troy the ancient, and influenced the 
modern world as greatly. Whether it was from 
such thoughts as these or not I cannot say, 
but the water of the Wishing Well seemed a 
draught inspiring beyond all other water. But 
we had other things to see yet, and above all 
to prove if the hill were hollow ; for the 
legends of the country assert that a noise 
made at King Arthur's Well is heard at the 
Wishing Well ; so the ladies stayed at the 
latter, while I started in search of King Ar- 
thur's Well, the other spring on the hill. This 
I found at no great distance, close to the 
cottage, and on the left side of the eastern 
road up the hill. There was a stone with a 
round hole in it about two feet across, the well 
below being a circular place about four feet 
deep, full of filthy and all but stagnant water, 
and quite powerless to excite the imagination. 
At the appointed time I made much noise by 



158 Talk at a Country House 

hitting boards and sticks on the mouth of the 
well ; but on going back to the Wishing Well 
found that my noises had not been heard. 
Considering that we had drunk deep of the 
clear spring, I was relieved to think it did 
not communicate with the poisonous waters of 
King Arthur's Well. We now set out to see 
more of the southern side, and, walking along 
past the cottage, found ourselves on the top 
of the first rampart. On the southeastern 
slope the walls of earth stand out in bald 
grandeur, for there are no trees, and here we 
could appreciate the enormous strength of the 
ramparts rising tier above tier over our heads. 
I have seen other camps of this kind, but 
never anything like this ; the steepness of the 
sides and the regularity of the slopes make it 
a striking spectacle. As we got farther round 
on the south side, trees began again, though 
more scattered ; and as we climbed up gradu- 
ally, startling countless rabbits, and at one 
place a badger, the views became of great 
beauty, till, reaching the top of the southern 
side, near the west gate, we looked down on 
the village of Sutton Montis. Nothing could 
have been more lovely. A little brook with 
willows skirted the fortress, after leaving the 
downs opposite w^hence it rose ; across this 
brook lay a vast orchard, the orderly rows of 
its great trees clearly seen from our height 3 



Riding down to Camelot 159 

beyond this came the 'pleasant villages and 
farms adjoined,' — one especially glowing roof 
of almost crimson tiles took the eye \ beyond 
this, again, the church, and then the vast 
sweep of view towards Dorsetshire. From 
here we went through the western gate of the 
top of the camp, and descended the hill by the 
road at that end, leaving Camelot by the west, 
having come there by the east. We then went 
a pleasant way across the grounds, orchards, 
and fields, till a path near the river took us 
back into Sparkford, where the interval till 
our train was due was filled by many cups of 
tea in a pleasant old inn. The train took us 
home in a golden evening, and we were left 
with visions of romance and of the monumental 
handiwork of a vanished people, all seen 
through a halo of midsummer sunlight."^ 

The Squire. Very good geography, physical, 
military, and archaeological ; not without a 
touch, too, of purple patch, and some of a 
very fine purple. 

Foster. If it had been full moon or the eve 
of St. John, I think I should have begged the 
ladies to stay with me, or to leave me there, 
that I, too, might hear and see Arthur and his 
knights come riding down King Arthur's Lane, 
as, according to local tradition, they have 

1 An account of an actual visit, by my son, Mr. Henry 
Strachey. 



i6o Talk at a Country House 

never left off doing since the days of Leland, 
whose account I have just being reading, who 
tells us of the silver horseshoe that one of 
them had cast in such a ride. 

The Squire. I have often fancied that if I 
had the poet's gift of looking into and seeing 
the imaginary past, while the senses of the 
present are laid asleep, the vision would come 
to me on the grassy mound called Arthur's 
Castle, at the top of the hill of Camelot. Even 
now that vision rises before me with successive 
magic scenes, " apart from place, withholding 
time," but always in that golden prime of 
Arthur and his knights. I seem to see the 
town of Camelot, while within the hall is the 
Round Table, its seats filling with knights 
come to the feast of Pentecost, though Arthur 
will not take his place till he hears from Sir 
Kay, the Seneschal, that an adventure is at 
hand, since some unknown lady or knight can 
be seen riding down the road. Scene after 
scene rises before me of things done, and 
words spoken, and quests undertaken, in that 
hall ; and not least that when the Holy Grail, 
covered with white samite, passed through, 
offering every knight for once to partake of 
that mysterious food, and awaking in him the 
resolve to achieve that quest. And then, 

" I see no longer, 1 myself am there," 

among the crowd of ladies and kni|;hts who 



Riding down to Camelot i6i 

gathered to see the barge which came floating 
down the river with the dead but beautiful 
Elaine, the Lady of Shalott, and hear Sir 
Launcelot tell her sad tale. The river may 
be seen by the bodily eye, and in the light of 
summer day; and so may Glastonbury and 
Avalon, no longer, indeed, an island on the 
one hand, and the site at least of the nunnery 
of Almesbury on the other. But now the vi- 
sion rises before me of the twofold story of 
Malory and Tennyson, of that parting, solemn 
to awfulness, of Arthur and Guenever, when 
he rode out through the mist, without looking 
back, to the battle which he knew was to be 
his last; of the battle, and of the coming of 
that barge with the weeping ladies who bore 
away the dying king to Avalon. Then, again, 
those last laments of Launcelot over Arthur 
and Guenever, and of Ector over Launcelot 
himself. These actions are very real to me ; 
and yet, as I speak, I know, like Prospero, 
that they are melting into air, into thin air. 

Foster. My sympathies are all with you. 
Squire, but yet forgive me if I ask, as I heard 
your little grandson ask the other day when 
you were telling him a story, " Is it true ? Tell 
me something real." And I should be glad to 
think that the fabric of your vision is not al- 
together baseless, and that there was an Arthur 
after all. Milton, with all his admiration for 



1 62 Talk at a Country House 

Arthur and his knights as heroes of romance, 
did not believe in his historical existence ; so 
you will hardly expect me to satisfy my doubts 
by the historical arguments with which Caxton 
tells us that many noble and divers gentlemen 
satisfied his doubts, nor even by the evidence 
which they called in of Gawain's skull, Cra- 
dock's mantle, and Launcelot's sword. 

The Squi?'e. Though you took his word for 
it that Camelot was Winchester. But I can give 
you better authority than that of Caxton, or 
Milton. Here (opening a drawer, and taking 
out a letter) is the last letter which I received 
from my old friend Edward Freeman. He 
writes : — 

" Guest taught me to believe in Arthur, and 
there is a notice of him which, if not history, 
is at best very early legend, in the Life of 
Gildas. It proves a good bit, anyhow. Then 
Rhys seemed to disbelieve in him, and now he 
seems to have taken to him again. I tell Rhys 
that I live much too near to Avalon, which is 
Glastonbury, to give him up altogether, and 
that I can't part with him to them of Strath- 
clyde." 

Foster. Gildas does not mention Arthur. 

The Squire. No ; but what I understood 
Freeman to mean is this : Agreeing with Green 
in acknowledging the great authority of Guest 
as to the history of this period, he takes the 



Riding down to Camelot ^63 



time of comparative peace and prosperity which 
Gildas describes to have been that of the 
reign of Arthur between 520 and 542. The 
resistance w^iich Arthur more or less success- 
fully maintained during his life was renewed 
after the battle of Deorham in 577, and not 
finally overcome by the Saxons till the battle 
of Penna in 658. And it is reasonable to sup- 
pose this long resistance was in part made 
possible by the support of the line of fortresses 
of which Camelot was the chief and centre. 

You will find the still later conclusions of 
Professor Rhys in his learned volume "The 
Arthurian Legend" and his Preface to Messrs. 
Dents' Edition of "Le Morte Darthur." 

But it is a very slight and dim existence at 
best. You just now compared the story of 
Arthur to that of Agamemnon ; and I might 
add that Camelot is to Malory's " Morte Dar- 
thur" what Dr. Schliemann's Troy is to the 

lUad. 

Foster. Why then did you say they were 
meltinginto thin air? 

The Squire. I cannot say so, after ail. 
Those knights and ladies do live to me, as I 
trust that they will live to many an English- 
speaking boy and girl yet unborn. But I will 
answer your question in the best Dryasdust 
fashion that I can. I do not attempt to follow 
up the old legends to those pre-Christian and 



164 Talk at a Country House 

even prehistoric sources of which some learned 
writers believe that they can get occasional 
glimpses. I am content to believe that in 
the ages in which war was more to men than 
peace, and imagination more than cool reason, 
the legends somehow grew up. The British 
bards termed the actual losses of their country- 
men glorious gain and triumphs of poetry; and 
when they were driven back into Cornwall and 
Wales and Scotland, they found everywhere 
new Camelots and Round Tables at Tintagel, 
Caerleon, and Carlisle, and across the sea in 
Brittany. Mr. Symonds tells us that in the 
Middle Ages the legends of Arthur were 
greater favorites with the educated classes in 
Italy than the earlier ones of Charlemagne, 
which were left to the common people. And 
it is a curious fact that Gervase of Tilbury, 
writing early in the thirteenth century, gives 
a story of the discovery in the woods of Mount 
Etna, in Sicily, of King Arthur, there biding 
his time in solemn seclusion, which exactly 
corresponds with the like story which has been 
told of the Somersetshire Camelot by a peas- 
ant girl to a lady, now living. The minstrel, 
or troubadour, wandered far ; and he carried 
everywhere with him not only the name, but 
the local habitation of his hero. 

Foster. Were not the Chivalry romances 
chiefly French ? 



Riding down to Camelot 165 

The Squire. If you except the greatest of 
all, that of Sir Thomas Malory, perhaps they 
were. He says there were in Welsh many, and 
in French many; and he also makes use of 
old English romances. But the Curate found 
in Don Quixote's library a pretty good number 
of Spanish romances. And you must remem- 
ber that French was the language of the 
English Norman lords and ladies, and that 
England was first of the lands of chivalry, 
whatever was its chief language. 

Foster. I think Southey says, in the preface 
either to his " Amadis " or " Palmerin," that the 
Spanish and Portuguese romances bear evi- 
dence, in their references to England, that 
this was so. 

The Squire. I like to see significance in the 
fact, pointed out by Frederick Maurice, that 
the man whom the Germans, the French, the 
Italians, and the Spaniards honored as ritter, 
chevalier, cavaliere, caballero, the rider of the 
war horse, was to the English the knight, the 
knecht, the servant of all men. 

Foster. Is not Amadis of Gaul the most 
perfect embodiment of the ideal of knight- 
hood ? He is as pure as Perceval or even 
Galahad, without their monk-like asceticism ; 
and as true and ardent a lover as Launcelot, 
without his guilty *' honor rooted in dishonor," 
as Tennyson calls it. 



1 66 Talk at a Country House 

The Squire. The loves of Amadis and 
Oriana are, indeed, charming. There is no- 
thing in Malory like that description of them 
in Southey's translation : — 

"Oriana was about ten years old, the fairest 
creature that ever was seen ; therefore she was 
called the one 'without a peer.' The Child of 
the Sea (that is, Amadis) was now twelve years 
old, but in stature and size he seemed fifteen, 
and he served the queen ; but now that Oriana 
was there, the queen gave her the Child of 
the Sea, that he should serve her, and Oriana 
said * that it pleased her ; ' and that word 
which she said, the Child kept in his heart, 
so that he never lost it from his memory, 
and in all his life he was never weary of 
serving her, and his heart was surrendered to 
her; and this love lasted as long as they 
lasted, for as well as he loved her did she also 
love him. But the Child of the Sea, who 
knew nothing of her love, thought himself 
presumptuous to have placed his thoughts on 
her, and dared not speak to her; and she, 
who loved him in her heart, was careful not to 
speak more with him than with another ; but 
their eyes delighted to reveal to the heart what 
was the thing on earth that they loved best, 
and now the time came that he thought he 
could take arms if he were knighted ; and this 
he greatly desired, thinking that he would do 



Riding down to Camelot 167 

such things that, if he lived, his mistress 
should esteem him." 

I often feel the force of the arguments of 
the worthy Ascham against the tales of chiv- 
alry, and wish that Malory had made Amadis, 
and not Launcelot, his principal hero. But 
then I recur to what Caxton had written long 
before, as if in anticipation of the charge, and 
how Tennyson has brought out, in full life and 
proportion as well as with the lineaments of 
the noblest poetry, this contrast between good 
and evil, and triumph of good over evil, which 
Caxton eulogizes in Malory's story. 

Foster. Milton, too, while he expresses a 
pious and thankful wonder that his youthful 
footsteps should have been directed in the 
paths of chastity by the tales of chivalry, 
among which Malory's " Morte Darthur " no 
doubt found a chief place, seems to recognize 
that the moral effect on his young mind had 
been good, and not evil. 

The Squire. The growth and progress of 
moral life are as marked and worthy of notice 
in our tales of chivalry as in any other form 
of our civilization. And it was our happy lot 
that, just at the right time, a William Caxton 
was ready to print and publish the great na- 
tional epic which he had found and encouraged 
a Sir Thomas Malory to write. Like the 
Iliad, it is partly of that lofty and serious 



Had ID irHkli 6ie imagiiiatioa can belieYe and 
find «4Jk»Ti»ent. A little later, riie oW tales erf 
duriliT cv>uld oah* have sup^tlied the material 
for a moral aUe§t»ry hke that <rf the ^Fa«ie 
Queene.^ or * g^aial burlesque like tiiat oC 
^^DcNa Quixote^*^ or a hanl cyxucal, political 
satire Kke that oC ** Hudibras.^* 

.Asier You hare said nodiin^ of Tenny- 
son^s revival, may I say, of the old faith in the 
old po<»iis. It is tnie, they are idyls* little 
pictures^ and you caU Sir Thomas Malory s 
romance am qpic. Do you hold to tiiat euk>- 
^btic des^nation of Makxy s "* Moite I>aitiiur,*' 
in ^Kre of die half-paticmtzii^* half<coiitemp> 
tuous lai^nsage in whidi the Caxtons of die 
presei^ day have described die tot book on 
mhkrh they hive just lavished aU die leamhig^ 
labor, and cost of many Tears» — a work vhich 
TOT few will care for or aq^veciate at its 
proper vdhie^ dMMgh many may extjoj the 
popular frails of it all ? 

TIr Sfmant. So it is^ and must be. I have 
die sinooest respect for a teaming industry; 
and gsftooas seiMerotkm to die cause of 



letters sudi as I can make htde pretmsion tou 
But idiile I know enoi^ of diese thii^ to 
afipreciate vhat diese scholais have done for 
ns» I see no proofs diat I oi^^ to submit 
myself to their an^horihr on a qaestion on 
whSc!: it ccntnScts my own fit^ary jo^ment. 



Riding down fo Camdot 



Look at thiy book of Malory's, " Morte Dar- 
Ihur," as it actually is, and not as the critics 
say it ou^ht to have been, if he had properly 
followed his sources. You will find on every 
page the marks of a work of true though early 
and somewhat rude art ; and then, if you will 
look again with your own eyes, and not with 
those of the critics, you will see that his art 
is all his own, and not to be found in the older 
legends which he has used as materials. 1 do 
not know whether Malory had acquaintance 
■with any of what have been called the master- 
pieces of antiquity, nor whether he was con- 
scious at all that he was himself creating one 
of such masterpieces. But his work itself lies 
before us. He has taken the legends of an 
old national hero and fashioned them into a 
work of art, with the main characteristic 
features of the epic, or the drama, of all ages 
and countries. It is what Carlyle would have 
called the perennial battle between God and 
the devil, — the contest between man's free 
will and his circumstances ; the Nemesis which 
attends his way during that contest, and his 
triumph by help of a higher power than his 
own. Ato9 S'cTeActcTo pf/vXrj, Arthur is born 
into a world of anarchy, for which the lav/- 
lessness of his father is more or less responsi- 
ble ; Merlin watches over him, and, by help of 
his counsels, Arthur, on reaching manhood, is 



lyo Talk at a Country House 

able to establish and consolidate his kingdom, 
and even to extend it over that of the Emperor 
of Rome ; and the Round Table at which he 
sat as the centre and head of his knights was 
the sign and token of this world under king- 
ship. But there was a canker at the root of 
all this glory. After many years of prosperity 
and of great deeds, bath good and evil, the 
coming of the Holy Grail brought a test which 
could not be escaped ; the fellowship of the 
Round Table was broken up, and Mordred, 
the child of the guilty loves of Arthur and 
Morgan le Fay long years before, became the 
instrument of divine judgment and retribution. 
Thus the personages of the story, through 
whose action its several threads are woven or 
unwound, are as artistically varied and dis- 
tinguished as are the events. Both these 
points of the story and the characters are dis- 
cussed at some length in the Introduction to 
the Globe Edition of " Morte Darthur," to 
which I may refer you, if you care for more. 
Only for the humor of it, do read me the 
account of the Bishop of Canterbury's excom- 
munication of Mordred. You will find a mark 
at the page. 

Foster. " And then came the Bishop of 
Canterbury, the which was a noble clerk and 
an holy man, and thus he said to Sir Mordred : 
Sir, what will ye do, will ye first displease God, 



Ridinsr down to Camelot 



71 



and sithen shame yourself and all knighthood ? 
Is not King Arthur your Uncle, no further but 
your mother's brother, and are not ye his son, 
therefore how may ye wed your father's wife ? 
Sir, saith the noble clerk, leave this opinion, 
or else I shall curse you with book, and bell, 
and candle. Do thy worst, said Sir Mordred, 
wit thou well I shall defy thee. Sir, said the 
Bishop, and wit you well I shall not fear me 
to do that me ought to do. Also where ye 
noise where my lord Arthur is slain, and that 
is not so, and therefore ye will make a foul 
work in this land. Peace, thou false priest, 
said Sir Mordred, for and thou chafe me any 
more, I shall strike off thy head. So the 
Bishop departed, and did the curseing in the 
most orgulous wise that might be done. And 
then Sir Mordred sought the Bishop of Canter- 
bury for to have slain him. Then the Bishop 
fled, and took part of his goods with him, and 
went nigh unto Glastonbury, and there he was 
as priest hermit in a chapel, and lived in 
poverty and in holy prayers : for well he 
understood that mischievous war was at hand." 
The Squire. That touch of the bishop es- 
caping into a humble and quiet hermitage, but 
prudently taking some of his goods with him, 
after he had done the cursing in the most 
orgulous manner, always strikes me as very 
happy. Sir Thomas Malory was a humorist ; 



172 Talk at a Country House 

but his pathos is greater than his humor. Let 
us hear those last words of Sir Launcelot and 
Sir Ector. One can never be weary of them. 

Foster (reads). " Truly, said Sir Launcelot, 
I trust I do not displease God, for He knoweth 
mine intent, for my sorrow was not, nor is not, 
for any rejoicing of sin, but my sorrow may 
never have end. For when I remember of her 
beauty and of her noblesse, that was both with 
her King and with her; so when I saw his 
corpse and her corpse so lie together, truly 
mine heart would not serve to sustain my 
careful body. Also when I remember me how, 
by my default, mine orgule, and my pride, that 
they were both laid full low, that were peerless 
that ever was living of Christian people, wit 
you well, said Sir Launcelot, this remembered, 
of their kindness and mine unkindness, sank 
so to my heart, that I might not sustain my- 
self." 

And again : — 

"Ah, Launcelot, he said, thou were the 
head of all Christian knights ; and now I dare 
say, said Sir Ector, thou Sir Launcelot, there 
thou liest, that thou were never matched of 
earthly knight's hand ; and thou were the 
courtliest knight that ever bare shield ; and 
thou were the truest friend to thy lover that 
ever bestrode horse, and thou were the truest 
lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman : 



Ridinsr down to Camelot 



173 



and thou were kindest man that ever strake 
with sword ; and thou were the goodliest per- 
son ever came among press of knights ; and 
thou was the meekest man and the gentlest 
that ever ate in hall among ladies ; and thou 
were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that 
ever put spear in the rest." 

The Squire. Here again I would refer you 
to the Globe Introduction for proof that in 
these and other instances the passages are 
either Malory's own, or have been converted 
by him into poetry out of mere prosaic materi- 
als. In his twenty-first, or last book, in which 
I think his art is at its highest, he frequently 
alters or changes the incidents from those in 
the French books which he is always quoting ; 
and in each case it seems to me that the 
variation has been made for the sake of artistic 
effect. 

Foster. You call " Morte Darthur " a poem, 
then, and Malory a poet ? 

The Squire. He has the poet's eye to see 
into the life of things, and the poet's power to 
endow what he sees with outward form and 
color, but he wanted that essential qualification 
of the proper poet which Wordsworth calls the 
accomplishment of verse. 

Foster. Did not Carlyle say that poetry 
would be better if it were written in prose 
instead of in verse, and that it might be hoped 



174 Talk at a Country House 

that the poetry of the future would be so 
written ? 

The Squire. I suppose we are all more 
ready to justify than to confess our mental 
deficiencies ; and though Carlyle had much 
poetic insight, he had not the poet's proper 
faculty of expression. 

Foster. How would you define this poetical 
mode of expression ? It is something more 
or other than the skillful art of making lines 
of ten syllables with or without rhymes at the 
end. 

The Squire. One characteristic — I had al- 
most said the characteristic — of verse, in the 
highest meaning of the word, is its reticence. 
It was said of the great linguist. Cardinal 
Mezzofanti, that he could keep silence in forty 
languages ; and the poet is a man who can 
and does keep silence in the midst of his 
wealth of rushing thoughts and words ; and it 
is in this accomplishment of verse that he finds 
that the limitations of verse make this silence 
both proper and profitable. His words must 
be few, while and because every one of them 
must be a creation, a cosmos, in itself, preg- 
nant with life and meaning. Tennyson evi- 
dently saw and understood this in the formation 
of his style, — in part cultivated his poet's art 
which makes his style, in the highest sense of 
the word, and in which it has been well said 



Riding down to Camelot 175 

to be the man himself. Mr. Knowles tells us ^ 
that he said " ' Wordsworth would have been 
much finer if he had written much less ; ' and 
he told Browning in my presence that ' if he 
had got rid of two thirds, the remaining third 
would be much finer.' After saying that, and 
when Browning had left us, he enlarged on the 
imperative necessity of restraint in art. ' It is 
necessary to respect the limits,' he said. 'An 
artist is one who recognizes bounds to his work 
as a necessity, and does not overflow inimit- 
ably to all extent about a matter. I soon 
found that if I meant to make any mark at all 
it must be by shortness, for all the men before 
me had been so diffuse, and all the big things 
had been done. To get the workmanship as 
nearly perfect as possible is the best chance 
for going down the stream of time. A small 
vessel on fine lines is likely to float further 
than a great raft.' " 

Foster, And so you contrast these small 
vessels, the '' Idylls," with Malory's great raft 
of " Le Morte Darthur " .? 

The Squire. Yes. And if you like to shift 
the metaphor from the ship to the river, 3^ou 
may quote Denham and say: — 

" Oh, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream 
My great example as it is my theme 1 
Though deep, yet clear ; though gentle, yet not dull ; 
Strong without rage ; without o'erflowing, full." 

1 Ninetee7ith Cetttury for January, 1893. 



176 Talk at a Country House 

Each generation has its own authorities and 
teachers. I quote Tennyson now ; fifty years 
ago I thought Coleridge's distinctions of poetry 
and romance, prose and verse, the best pos- 
sible ; and indeed I think you will still find 
them worth reading. 

Foster. I know them well, though I did not 
read them fifty years ago. Judged by Cole- 
ridge's standard, is not Malory's book a ro- 
mance rather than a poem ? 

The Squire. Perhaps it is. I am not at all 
willing, even for Malory's sake, to break down 
the distinction between prose and verse which 
I think so real and so important. I will con- 
tent myself with saying that it is a work of art, 
real though rude ; and for this I have the 
voice of the world of letters, gentle and simple, 
on my side, the few and minute critics notwith- 
standing. Whatever sidelights their learning 
may have supplied to Spenser, Milton, and 
Tennyson, there can be no reasonable doubt 
that the Arthur and his knights whom they knew 
are the king and knights of Malory. The popular 
voice of approval has never been silent since 
Caxton printed his first edition ; and during 
the present century it has been raised, with an 
ever-increasing volume, to what Tennyson may 
be said to have given a not inappropriate ex- 
pression when he said, " There is no grander 
subject in the world than King Arthur." 



Riding down to Camelot 177 

Foster. The bibliography of the book is curi- 
ous and interesting, especially as to Upcott's 
very ingenious interpolations to supply the 
missing pages of the Althorp copy. It seems 
odd that the truth had remained undiscovered 
for fifty years till you told the story in the In- 
troduction to the Globe Edition. 

The Squire. When I came to look into the 
history of the text for myself, I was astonished 
at the inaccuracy and slovenliness of the pro- 
fessional critics, and their habit of putting 
second-hand guesses in the place of verified 
facts. But I venture to say that you may 
depend on the bibliography of the Globe In- 
troduction and the Prolegomena of Dr. Som- 
mer. The work of Dr. Sommer is, indeed, a 
wonderful monument of German learning, in- 
dustry, and contentment with the reward of 
the approval and admiration of the few schol- 
ars competent to judge of its merits. 

Foster. I am afraid that you cannot include 
the authorities of the British Museum among 
those who justly appreciate the worth of 
Malory's book, when they allowed the one 
perfect copy of the original edition to go to 
America. 

The Squire. From what I have heard, I 
guess that they outwitted themselves by the 
overdone caution — not uncommon with buyers 
at auctions — of trying to make their purchase 



178 Talk at a Country House 

without giving their bidding agent a free hand. 
I was very sorry when I first heard that the 
precious volume which, when it lay in the 
Osterly Park library, had been seen by very 
few but myself, was gone to Brooklyn instead 
of to Bloomsbury. But I could no longer 
grudge the loss when I remembered that the 
treasure had only gone to our brothers — may 
I say our sister ? — across the Atlantic, with 
whom, as its possessor, Mrs. Abby E. Pope, 
tells me, it is prized more than it was among 
ourselves. I could only wish that it may be 
as safe from risks of fire and other damage as 
it would have been in the British Museum, 
and that the present possessor of the Althorp 
copy will obtain — as would no doubt be al- 
lowed — a photograph facsimile of the missing 
pages, to be substituted for the very inaccurate 
though beautifully written transcript by Whit- 
taker. But here comes tea. Queen Guenever 
and her ladies never poured out that at the 
Round Table, nor invited Arthur and his 
knights to " five o'clocker." 



VIII. 

THE ARROWHEADED INSCRIPTIONS. 

The dust of a vanished race. 

Tennyson. 

I KNEW that the Squire took much interest 
in the Arrowheaded Inscriptions, so one morn- 
ing I got him to talk on the subject. 

Foster. Do you read the Arrowheaded In- 
scriptions of which I see so many volumes ? 

The Squire. No; I content myself with en- 
joying the fruits of other men's labors ; hoping, 
however, that I may occasionally get from 
these learned men some new light on questions 
which may not have attracted their own atten- 
tion. 

Foster. Scholars now quote the records of 
Rameses and Sennacherib as much of course 
as they do the Commentaries of Caesar ; but 
the discovery of the key to the decipherment 
of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the arrow- 
headed inscriptions must have seemed very 
wonderful at first, as indeed it was. 

The Squire. Yes. These keys, like photo- 
graphy, with the silver plate of Daguerre fol- 



i8o Talk at a Country House 



lowed by the paper-printing of Talbot ; the 
electric telegraph, with its development of the 
telephone and the phonograph ; and I may- 
add, the uses of steam by sea and land, — all 
these are now every-day things. Yet I can 
recollect something of the sense of the marvel- 
ous which fell upon some of us on their first 
discovery. It seemed a happiness only to 
have lived in those days, to borrow a phrase 
from Wordsworth about the early days of the 
French Revolution ; only we, happily, have not 
had to repent, as he had to do. 

Foster. The reading of the Egyptian hiero- 
glyphics seems comparatively easy, if I rightly 
remember the account of the process. Was 
it not that the French, in 1799, found at 
Rosetta a stone with an inscription of Ptolemy 
Euergetes in Greek and in the demotic or 
common Egyptian writing of the period, as 
well as in hieroglyphics ? And then, by assum- 
ing that the vernacular Egyptian of the time 
of the inscription did not differ materially from 
the Coptic of the present day, it was found 
that Coptic equivalents for the several words 
of the Greek could be made out and read 
in the demotic version, so that finally the 
hieroglyphic inscription itself could be read. 
But then Ptolemy, like Pharaoh, had told his 
dream to the wise men, who had to interpret 
it. Nebuchadnezzar needed to be told his 



The Arrowheaded Inscriptions i8i 

dream as well as the interpretation thereof. 
There was no inscription, in Greek or any 
other known language, was there, at Persepo- 
lis or Behistun ? 

The Squire. On the contrary : Diodorus said 
the Behistun inscription was by Semiramis, 
and Rawlinson found it to be by Darius. You 
are right in the main as to the comparative 
easiness of the hieroglyphic decipherment, I 
think, but in both cases the discoverers must 
have possessed and exercised no small amount 
of the powers of criticism and divination, 
which Niebuhr calls the means by which his- 
tory supplies the deficiencies of its sources. 
But the decipherment of the arrowheaded in- 
scriptions was no doubt by far the more diffi- 
cult ; and its results have, in my opinion, far 
surpassed the other in their interest and histor- 
ical importance. 

Foster. I know less about the arrowheaded 
than about the hieroglyphic inscriptions, and 
shall be glad if you will tell me something 
about them. 

The Squire. The subject is a vast one, and 
it continues to increase. I will show you the 
few pebbles I have picked up on the shore ; 
but if I exhaust your patience, it will not be 
by the knowledge of the learned Dr. Dryasdust 
who has recorded all that has been done or 
written on the subject. I have only the odds 



1 82 Talk at a Country House 

and ends which I have gathered up through 
many years from journals of learned societies, 
books of translations, monographs on fresh 
discoveries of lions and bulls and bricks and 
slabs, and so on in infinite variety. 

Foster. It is a pleasant way of getting know- 
ledge, if only a man's memory can keep all 
that he so collects ; but 

" Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back 
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion." 

The Squire. No ; I will, like Time, in this 
case quote the general at the siege of the 
impregnable fortress of Bhurtpore, when he 
had ordered a gun up to a particular position. 
The officer came back, after some time, and 
reported that it was impossible. " Impossible, 
sir ! Why, I have the order in my pocket ! " 
So the gun was brought up, and the fort was 
taken. There, at Persepolis, for two thousand 
years had stood that rock, rising four hundred 
feet above the plain, with its scarped face 
covered with writing which no man could read, 
and so looking foolishly enough, as Carlyle 
said of the Pyramids. The imaginative in- 
habitants of the land, forgetting that their own 
fathers had written and read those words, 
believed them to be the work of jins, telling 
of hidden hoards of gold and jewels never to 
be discovered, while some wise skeptic from 
the West pronounced them to be merely the 



The Arrowheaded Inscriptions 183 

work of worms. But there, age after age, still 
stood the old General Time, with the order in 
his pocket, waiting for the hour and the man. 
The beginnings of the discovery were humble 
and its progress was slow, but we may say that 
the critic and the diviner were there from the 
first with Philology, Archaeology, and History 
for their tools to work with. Increasing in- 
telligence and accuracy in copying the inscrip- 
tion were followed by increasing recognition of 
the arrangements, repetitions, and variations of 
the still unknown characters. They were in 
three columns, of which there were in one 
only forty-two of the little groups of arrow- 
heads or wedges, each of which groups might 
be assumed to be a letter ; in another column 
there were four hundred of such groups, which 
therefore must have been ideographic: and 
these characters and signs, for which ample 
space was taken at one end of the line, were 
crowded together at the other, thus showing 
that the writing was from left to right. From 
each of these facts was derived an hypothesis, 
which, when verified, became the law of a new 
hypothesis, to be verified and expanded again 
in like manner. If these columns were used 
for a proclamation by a king ruling over the 
country in which they stood as a centre, the 
three columns were probably the same pro- 
clamation in the three principal languages of 



184 Talk at a Cowitry House 

the monarchy, like those which the Sultan of 
Constantinople or the Shah of Persia still 
issues in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. It 
might be taken that, being at Persepolis, this 
proclamation was by some king of the once 
great Persian Empire ; that the language of 
one of its columns would be the Persian of the 
time ; and that, with the unchanging customs 
and habits of the East, the style of his pro- 
clamation would most likely be the same as 
that used by the Sassanian dynasty which 
reigned in Persia till the Muhammedan con- 
quest. The languages of the columns with 
the letters or signs counted by hundreds were 
clearly what we call ideographic, like those of 
the Chinese or the Egyptians, in which each 
character represents a mental image ; while the 
writing of the column with only forty-two va- 
riations of character was as plainly phonetic, 
in which each sign was merely a letter of an 
alphabet, as with ourselves. By these steps, 
Grotefend, in 1802, reached his position : the 
right-hand column is in alphabetical writing, 
and, assuming it to be a proclamation in the 
Sassanian form, beginning with the name of a 
king who calls himself king of kings, and son 
of a king with another name and the same 
title. Now, as to the inscription beginning 
with three words differing from one another, 
but combined with three other words, these 



The Arrow headed Inscriptions 185 

repeated twice, the third being the same as 
the second, with an additional letter or letters, 
— I cannot put my hand on Grotefend's paper, 
but I understand his reasoning to be some- 
thing of this kind : Call the three first-men- 
tioned words A, B, and C, and the sentence 
will run thus : A, king of kings, son of B, king 
of kings, son of C. The word read as king is 
repeated with an addition which indicates the 
genitive plural, while the other repeated word 
stands for son. But C is not called " king of 
kings," like the other two. Then the three 
names are Xerxes, Darius, and Hystaspes ; 
for the last, though father of Darius, was not 
a king. But to say that certain words meant 
S071 or ki7ig was not to read the words them- 
selves, or to say to what language they be- 
longed. Now, however, the Zend, or ancient 
Persian, began to be studied, and it became 
possible to say what those words would be 
if all the other assumptions were true. The 
other letters were hypothetically added to 
those which made up the names of the three 
kings. If Zend were the language in which 
the inscription was written, the words for son 
and king of ki?igs would be putra and kshaya- 
thtya, and more letters of the alphabet would 
be added to those in the three kings' names. 
So the inscription was gradually read, found 
to agree with the story of Herodotus, and 



i86 Talk at a Country House 

took its place among the records of ancient 
Persia. 

Foster. And so a key was found, like that 
of the Greek version on the Rosetta stone, for 
reading the other Persepolis inscriptions, one 
of which was, I suppose, Assyrian ? 

The Squire. The actual course of things 
was somewhat different. Colonel (afterwards 
Sir Henry) Rawlinson, containing in himself, 
in no common degree and in very various 
kinds, the qualifications of a man of action 
and of letters, had become so familiar with 
arrowheaded writing, which he had studied at 
Persepolis, that it seems as if it had been a 
sort of mother tongue to him, when he says 
that he cannot remember and trace back the 
steps by which he arrived at his knowledge. 
On visiting Behistun, he was able to read the 
Persian column of the trilingual inscription 
there found, and to tell the world that it was 
a proclamation, not of Semiramis, as Diodorus 
had supposed, but of Darius. A copy of the 
text with a translation was sent to England 
by Rawlinson, and published in the Journal 
of the Asiatic Society in 1847. To employ 
this deciphered inscription for the purpose of 
reading the other inscriptions side by side 
with it might have been interesting to Rawlin- 
son in any case, but a new motive for such 
work had arisen. Botta in 1847, ^"^^ Layard 



The Arrowheaded Liscriptions 187 

in 1845, h^d discovered, by actual excavation, 
the vast remains of the palaces of Nineveh 
and other cities of Assyria, the existence of 
which, under great earth mounds, had been 
conjectured by King in 18 18. These excava- 
tions were the beginning of a work which is 
still going on ; of the discovery not only of 
the remains of magnificent buildings, but of 
an almost infinite variety of written records 
in the arrowheaded characters. There were 
not only monumental inscriptions on colossal 
bulls and lions, and on alabaster slabs which 
had lined the walls of the palaces, but also on 
clay tablets of every size, which had been 
baked after the arrowheads had been im- 
pressed on them, and which tablets were 
eventually (as I will explain directly) found 
to be books of all sorts. The characters in 
which all these were written were recognized 
as those of one of the trilingual inscriptions 
of Persepolis and Behistun ; the genius which 
had read the Persian inscription o-f Behistun 
must have found it comparatively easy to read 
the Assyrian column, while employing Hebrew, 
just as Zend had been employed in the pre- 
vious case, at each step of hypothesis and 
verification. And in 1852 Rawlinson was able 
to send home from Nineveh the Assyrian 
annals of Sargon and Sennacherib themselves, 
whom we had till then known of only from the 



i88 Talk at a Country House 

Hebrew history, and the still scantier Greek 
records. There were at first many failures 
and hitches, and learned men looked more or 
less doubtfully on the popular enthusiasm at a 
discovery which came home to every one who 
had read the Bible. Some years later a chal- 
lenge was given, and accepted by Rawlinson, 
Hincks, Talbot, and Oppert, to translate in- 
dependently of one another an inscription of 
which the untranslated original had been pub- 
lished by the British Museum ; and to submit 
this to the judgment of Sir George Cornwall 
Lewis, Dean Milman, and Mr. Grote. The 
versions substantially agreed, except as to the 
proper names ; but, if I remember rightly. Sir 
George Lewis remained incredulous, and Mr. 
Grote not quite satisfied. The key to the 
special mystery of these and other proper 
names was eventually found ; and I suppose 
that no one now has doubts that those who 
are at the trouble may learn to read Assyrian 
as they do Greek or Sanskrit. 

Foster. A library of brickbats for books 
sounds funny. It must have required some 
courage to begin reading in it. 

The Squire. Yes ; and especially when the 
books lay in heaps by the thousand, having, 
as Mr. George Smith conjectured, fallen with 
the ruins of the building, from an upper floor. 

Foster. You alluded to other special difficul- 



The Arrow/leaded Inscriptions 189 

ties in the way of decipherment; what were 
they? 

The Squire. If I have rightly read the 
earlier work in the fuller light of the later 
knowledge, the story is something of this 
kind : The Assyrians were in the main a Sem- 
itic people ; their language, like their race, was 
allied to that of the Hebrews, and their writ- 
ing, like the Hebrew, was alphabetical. But 
the older civilization of Babylon, from which 
Assyria derived much of its own, was Tu- 
ranian, and its method of writing was not 
alphabetic, but ideographic, like that of the 
Chinese and several other peoples. The As- 
syrians, very oddly, as it seems to us, com- 
bined the two methods, using dictionaries for 
the purpose, some of which have been actually 
found in what you call the library of brickbats. 

Foster. Can you give me an example ? 

The Squire. Here is one which I took many 
years ago. The Roman letter and numeral X 
is for many purposes an English ideograph, or 
character, used to express, in writing, not a 
mere sound, but a mental image. In a date 
we read it ten ; after a king's name, the tenth ; 
between two figures, as 3x3, we read it in- 
differently as times, into, or multiplied by ; the 
mathematician uses it as a7i ufiknown quantity ; 
and the stockbroker reads Xdiv. as without 
the dividend. No one hesitates to read Xway 



iQo Talk at a Country House 

as crossway ; and though X only represents a 
syllable in Xmas, Xtian, and like words, here, 
too, it may be called an ideograph. But now 
suppose that, in addition to all these uses of 
X in writing, we employed it also to express 
the sound of ten without attaching any mental 
image to it, and in any word in which that 
sound occurred as one of its joints, as in 
tenant, tender, teiit, we indifferently wrote the 
full word in alphabetic letters, or substituted 
X for t-e-n, and so with Xant, Xder, Xt. Im- 
agine this double method of expressing what 
I call a joint, or joints, in a word employed 
habitually, and with every variety of ideo- 
graphic sign drawn from the Babylonian ideo- 
graphic writing, and you have the usual As- 
syrian method of writing. This may serve as 
an illustration, though it is of course only a 
small and fragmentary one, of what was a very 
complicated business, though no doubt it was 
easy to those accustomed to it. But, as I have 
said, they used dictionaries or lists of ideo- 
graphic characters with their equivalents in 
Assyrian letters. 

Foster. Was it from these dictionaries that 
the way to read the strange forms embodied in 
half-spelt words was found out ? 

The Squire. No. I think the first discovery 
was by help of one of those happy accidents 
which come to men of genius, and which they 



The Arrowheaded Inscriptions 191 

know how to seize and make their own. An 
inscription was found in duplicate. In one 
copy Rawlinson came to a word which, if read 
phonetically and as if the language were He- 
brew, gave good sense ; in the other copy, this 
word was expressed by one which, if so read, 
would give no sense, and was in fact no word. 
This, then, was the ideographic equivalent of 
the real word. The clue was followed, and 
the labyrinth was traversed in and out. If you 
would explore the matter farther, you must 
put yourself under the guidance of Rawlinson, 
Schrader, Sayce, and George Smith; and in- 
deed I might easily add other names. 

Foster. It is curious that while the Hebrews 
were using leather and the Egyptians papyrus 
to write on, the Assyrians should have used 
clay. 

The Squire. It is fortunate that they did so. 
They did, however, also use some perishable 
material, no doubt leather ; for seals have been 
found with the holes for the strings which 
fastened them to the scrolls, and even the 
remains of the strings themselves. These seals 
are of clay, often with two impressions, one of 
which has Phoenician characters, showing them 
to belong to contracts between two parties. 
Some of these deeds of sale between Phoe- 
nician and Assyrian traders have also been 
found, and have helped to throw light on the 



192 Talk at a Country House 

question of language. But the most interest- 
ing of all the seals is one which bears the 
Egyptian hieroglyphics which had been already 
read by Egyptologists as the name Sabaco II., 
king of Egypt, and also an Assyrian device of 
a priest ministering before the king, which is 
reasonably supposed to be the royal signet of 
Sennacherib, the contemporary of Sabaco. It 
is manifestly the seal of a treaty between these 
two monarchs whom we know to have met in 
battle not many miles from Jerusalem. 

Foster, Has the discovery of Egyptian and 
Assyrian records given much help in the study 
of Hebrew history and literature ? 

The Squire. A good many facts, more or 
less important, and much general light, in 
which the old facts may be seen more plainly 
than before. A second history, especially if 
it be a contemporary history, always gives a 
greater sense of reality to the first one. One 
of the uses of two eyes is that each eye sees 
a little more of one side of the object than 
does the other ; and thus the object is seen to 
be, what it is, a solid, and not a flat object. A 
photograph represents an object as seen with 
one eye ; and when two such photographs are 
brought together into one picture by the 
stereoscope, we immediately perceive an effect 
of roundness instead of flatness. We may and 
do know that an object is solid, though we 



The Arrowheaded Inscriptions 193 

look at it with only one eye, but we only see 
it to be so when we look at it with both. 
Critics with the historical imagination of Gro- 
tius and Gesenius could infer and make out 
from the discourses of Isaiah the military and 
political position of Jerusalem when its little 
territory was becoming the battlefield on which 
the rival monarchies of Egypt and Assyria met 
to fight for empire. But the picture is made 
still more lifelike when, alongside of the actual 
speeches by which Isaiah sustained and di- 
rected the energies of his king and countrymen 
in the supreme hour, are read the annals in 
which Sennacherib tells what he and his army 
were doing at the same time, within the sight 
of the men who, from the walls of the city, 
could see the valleys and plain full of Assyrian 
horsemen. 

Foster. And besides these military and polit- 
ical annals, are there not some considerable 
remains of literature of the kind which reflects 
the general moral and intellectual culture of a 
nation ? 

The Squire. Yes, and these, too, throw much 
light on the history and literature of the Jews. 
Now that we know that the people of Israel, 
at the period to which they carried back the 
life of their national ancestor Abraham, were 
in the midst of nations which had not only 
reached a high degree of civilization, but knew 



194 Talk at a Country House 

how to record that civilization in writing, we 
should be wholly unreasonable if we doubted 
the claim of the Jews to the possession of 
equally early written records. The old or- 
thodox belief that Moses was miraculously 
enabled to write the Pentateuch, and the 
preposterous modern adaptation of the old 
rabbinical legend that it was the work of Ezra 
after his return from the exile, are equally 
unnecessary. 

Foster. Are you not rather unfair to these 
modern critics ? I recollect a J and E as well 
as a P C in the list of what I suppose you 
would call their imaginary documents. And 
then, is not " preposterous " rather a strong, 
or, as Jeremy Bentham would have said, " dys- 
logistic" word.? 

The Squire. When Burke was called to 
order for using the word " preposterous " in 
one of his speeches in the Warren Hastings 
trial, he justified himself by observing that the 
word only meant putting the cart before the 
horse. I cannot but think that this is a com- 
mon habit of mind in our modern Biblical 
critics ; though I respect the wonderful minute- 
ness and industry of their learning, and have 
no doubt that it often throws new light on the 
subject they treat of. 

Foster, Then you do not accept as con- 
clusive the decision of Professor Wellhausen 



The Arrow headed Inscriptions 195 

that the Old Testament, as we have it, was 
edited and published in the year 444 b. c. ? 

The Squire. I know that a German professor 
is, like the prophet Habakkuk in the opinion 
of Voltaire, and the father of a family accord- 
ing to Napoleon, ^^ capable de tout.''' Yet I 
have looked at that date again and again, 
and wondered how any one could believe it 
possible to evolve out of his inner conscious- 
ness the exact year, more than twenty-three 
centuries ago, of an event of which there is 
no record that it happened at all ; and why 
that odd number of 4, or even 44, when deal- 
ing with so many hundreds, and even thou- 
sands ? I can only compare this conscientious 
accuracy to that of the man who refused to 
imperil his immortal soul by saying that he 
had killed the round number of an hundred 
canvas-back ducks when in fact it was only 
ninety-nine. 

Foster. But, Squire, you just now quoted 
with approval Niebuhr's two qualifications for 
the historian, — criticism and divination. Will 
you not allow his countrymen and their Eng- 
lish followers the use of these things in the 
study of Hebrew literature ? 

The Squire. If they only would use them 
more than they do ! The true critic is a judge. 
His business is to bring all the ascertainable 
facts of the case into clear light and order, 



196 Talk at a Country House 

and then either to pronounce a judgment, or 
to declare that no judgment is possible for 
want of sufficient evidence. He is not, in the 
latter case, to make up the deficiency by 
fancies drawn from his inner consciousness to 
supply the lack of facts. 

Foster. Is not this the divination of Nie- 
buhr.? 

The Squire. No, no. I believe Niebuhr 
himself may have sometimes mistaken the one 
for the other, but they are not the same thing. 
Divination in history is seeing into the life of 
things, not the dissection of a dead body and 
the labeUng of the several parts. But there is 
another saying of Niebuhr's which is more to 
the point. He says that when in Rome you 
may often see existing walls with marble frag- 
ments of columns and cornices built into 
them ; and it is certain that these are the 
portions of some older buildings, temples or 
palaces perhaps, but it is impossible to say 
what those buildings were. A like illustration 
might be drawn from some of our old churches 
and manor houses ; and we know what woeful 
work our own learned modern architects have 
made of their so-called restoration of these. 
The churchwardens' whitewash has done far 
less harm. I have no difficulty in seeing, with 
Astruc, the plain marks in Genesis of two 
records, marked by the names of Elohim and 



The Arrowheaded LtscripiHons 197 

Jehovah respectively ; but I cannot follow 
Wellhausen in the ideal reconstruction of his 
so-called prophetic and priestly documents 
elaborated out of the early books, and duly 
docketed J E and P C. 

Foster. I see your shelves full of the com- 
mentators you so scoff at. 

The Squire. I not only respect, but profit by 
their learning and industry, which are very 
great. I gladly use their books, though I do 
not like to wear their chains. There are some 
words of Grote on a like question in Greek 
literature which deserve to be written in letters 
of gold, and to be ever before the eyes of the 
student of the Old Testament. He says : 
" The lesson must be learnt, hard and painful 
though it be, that no imaginable reach of 
critical acumen will of itself enable us to 
discriminate fancy from reality in the absence 
of a tolerable stock of evidence. ... In truth, 
our means of knowledge are so limited, that 
no man can produce arguments sufficiently 
cogent to contend against opposing preconcep- 
tions, and it creates a painful sentiment of 
diffidence when we use expressions of equal 
and absolute persuasion with which the two 
opposite conclusions have been advanced." 

Foster. 

" And art thou nothing? Such thou art as when 
The woodman winding westward up the glen 



198 Talk at a Country House 

At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze 
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze, 
Sees all before him, gliding without tread. 
An image with a glory round its head. 
The enamored rustic worships its fair hues. 
Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues." 

It seems a pity ; is nothing left for us but this 
luminous mist ? 

The Squire. The books themselves ; read 
the commentaries with them. You will not 
understand the books without their help. Only, 
read the commentaries for the sake of the 
books, and not the books for the sake of the 
commentaries, as has been always, and still is, 
the habit of too many, from the days of the 
Talmud, and before, down to our own. 

Foster. You remind me of Bacon's advice : 
'* Read not to contradict and confute, nor to 
believe and take for granted, nor to find talk 
and discourse, but to weigh and consider." 

The Squire. You can have no better instruc- 
tion for the use of the commentaries. And for 
the books themselves, the more you read them 
for their own sake, the more you will find 
worth reading in them. People often think it 
clever to say that the Bible should be treated 
like other books. I wish it got a little more 
such treatment. Those who believe that it 
really differs in some respects from other 
books ought to be the most convinced that the 
more clearly you bring out the resemblances, 



The Arrowheaded Inscriptions 199 

the more distinctly will the differences come 
out, too. Read the books as they are, and let 
the likenesses and the unlikenesses come out 
as they may. 

Foster. Will you give me some illustration 
of your method t I will ask no questions as 
to the authorship of the book of Genesis, but 
what do you say of its account of the Creation, 
when the modern sciences of astronomy, geo- 
logy, and ethnology have shown us that the 
beginnings of all things are lost in infinite 
distances of time and place ? 

The Squire. Whatever discoveries the mind 
of man has made in all these directions, — and 
I do not question their reality or their im- 
portance, — they have neither satisfied nor 
even ascertained man's demand for some ideal 
of a Creation, the work of a Creator. And 
this is just what the Hebrew story of the 
Creation supplies. David Hume, lifting his 
eyes to the sky on a starry night, said to 
Adam Ferguson, " Oh, Adam, how can a man 
look at that and not believe in a God ! " Some 
three thousand years before, the same faith 
was perhaps awakened by the same sight in 
the mind of the Hebrew, whoever he was. 
The institutions of his country had accustomed 
him to think of work and duty with the rules 
of law and order as the highest and noblest 
forms of life, and therefore those ideals in 



200 Talk at a Country House 

which his belief in a Creator must centre itself. 
It must be work and it must be good, worthy 
of the highest workman. But there are method, 
law, and order in all the higher kinds of work. 
One of the most ancient of his national in- 
stitutions, held to have been given to his 
people by the Divine King himself^ was that 
work was regulated by the week, — the division 
of time into six days of work and one of rest. 

Foster. Then do you go on to discuss such 
questions as whether these days in Genesis 
are actual days or geological periods; and if 
the latter, whether they have any claim to 
represent accurately those periods in our mod- 
ern science ? 

The Squire. I repeat that I certainly like to 
read such disquisitions, but not either to con- 
tradict and confute, nor to believe and follow. 
I prefer the treatment of Seneca and Cicero, 
of Addison and Wordsworth, as well as that 
of the Hebrew psalmists and prophets them- 
selves. There is, too, if I remember rightly, 
a fine passage in Luther's Commentary on 
Genesis to the like effect. The concrete forms 
of the imagination are not less natural than 
our logical or scientific abstractions, and are 
much more needful to our moral life. And 
when you show me that Hebrew imagination 
and modern science and logic do not run 
together exactly on all fours, and that there 



The Arrowheaded Inscriptions 2 o r 

has been no miraculous interposition to give 
the first the same kind of accuracy as belongs 
to the others, I say, so much the better. Logi- 
cal skepticism, like that of Hume and John 
Mill, recognizes the conceivableness of a 
miracle where there is a reasonable ground 
for expecting it ; but here the account of 
Creation is all the more human because it in 
no way anticipates Newton's "Principia" or 
Lyell's " Principles of Geology." Nor is any 
claim it may have to be held to be super- 
human affected by the showing that it is not 
preter- or non-human. 

Foster. Do not the readers of the arrow- 
headed inscriptions find that the Assyrians 
divided the lunar month into four weeks, with 
days of rest named the Sabbath, and an ac- 
count of the Creation in six days ? 

The Squi?'e. We are told so, with other 
things of a like kind. If they were confirmed, 
they suggest the question whether the Hebrew 
traditions, which are so infinitely nobler in 
moral and intellectual as well as literary char- 
acter, are developments of the ruder and 
coarser beliefs, or are themselves the older, 
and were afterwards degraded from their ear- 
lier simplicity. The Hebrew account of the 
migration of their traditional ancestor, Abra- 
ham, will fall in with either supposition. The 
germs of national life, civil and religious, 



202 Talk at a Country House 

which he brought with him, and which eventu- 
ally grew into so great a tree, may have been 
mere germs, or they may have already grown 
up somewhat, though in very inferior forms, in 
Babylon and Assyria. The question is inter- 
esting, yet it is perhaps incapable of any 
answer but what the individual habit of mind 
of the inquirer may give it. 

Foster. I understand you, then, to hold that 
there is so little evidence as to the early or 
late date of the Hebrew books, and so much 
probable, at least plausible argument on either 
side, that the reasonable course is to keep the 
mind in suspense on the subject. I like to 
hear both sides; and yet when I have heard 
one, I always feel like the judge who, when 
he had heard the plaintiff, stopped the case, 
because he said he saw it very clearly as it 
was, and should only be puzzled if he heard 
more. 

The Squire. So do I ; but there is no help 
for it. Anyhow, these prose epics of the 
Hebrews keep their ground, age after age, in 
all lands : and that because, for simplicity, 
pathos, grandeur, and, in a word, humanity, 
there is nothing equal to them. They, and 
not Latin and Greek, are the litem humaniores 
of the world. Milton was a competent judge, 
for he knew all alike, and he expressed his 
preference for the Hebrew above all other 



The Arrowheaded Inscriptions 203 

literatures. Of its lyric poetry, after speaking, 
in the preface to his second book on the 
"Reason of Church Government," of "those 
magnific odes wherein Pindarus and Calli- 
machus are in most things worthy," he says, 
" But those frequent songs throughout the Law 
and the Prophets, beyond all these, not in their 
divine argument alone, but in the very critical 
art of composition, may be easily made to 
appear, over all the kinds of lyric poetry, to 
be incomparable." 

Foster. Does Milton anywhere speak of the 
book of Job ? 

The Squire. I do not remember that he 
does. He calls the Song of Solomon a pas- 
toral drama; and no one would have gainsaid 
him if he had declared that the book of Job 
embodies in the purest poetry the true idea of 
the tragic drama, — the riddle of the Sphinx 
of Greek tragedy. And then you know as well 
as I do his comparison of the Hebrew poets 
and prophets with the Greek and Roman poets 
and orators. But let me hear you read what 
one can never be tired of. 

Foster (reads). 

*' Or, if I would delight my private hours 
With music or with poem, where so soon 
As in our native language can I find 
That solace ? All our law and story strew'd 
With hymns, our psalms with artful terms inscrib'd, 
Our Hebrew songs and harps, in Babylon 



204 '^C'^k at a Country House 

That pleased so well our victor's ear, declare 

That rather Greece from us these arts derived ; 

111 imitated, while they loudest sing 

The vices of their deities, and their own 

In fable, hymn, or song, so personating 

Their gods ridiculous, and themselves past shame. 

Remove their swelling epithets, thick laid 

As varnish on a harlot's cheek, the rest, 

Thin sown with aught of profit or delight, 

Will far be found unworthy to compare 

With Sion's songs, to all true taste excelling, 

Where God is praised aright, and godlike men, 

The Holiest of Holies, and his saints ; 

Such are from God inspir'd, not such from thee, 

Unless where moral virtue is express'd 

By light of nature not in all quite lost. 

Their orators thou then extoll'st, as those 

The top of eloquence ; statists indeed, 

And lovers of their country, as may seem ; 

But herein to our prophets far beneath, 

As men divinely taught, and better teaching 

The solid rules of civil government 

In their majestic, unaffected style. 

Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome. 

In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt. 

What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so, 

What ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat ; 

These only with our law best form a king." 

Do you think that their political philosophy 
was so instructive and important as he says ? 

The Squire. I have written a volume to try 
to answer the question, Yes, as to one of the 
prophets, Isaiah. But still I continue to ask 
it of myself. My doubt is less whether it is 
true than how and when it can and will be 
shown to be true. Our political morality is 



The Arrow headed Inscriptions 205 

not very high ; yet we Hve and move, if only 
half consciously, in a religious atmosphere 
unknown to the Greeks and Romans, but 
without which we could not breathe. And this 
atmosphere is the belief in the God made 
known to the Hebrews in the plain of Mamre 
and the Temple of Jerusalem. 

Foster. I suppose the diiferences and con- 
trasts between the Jewish and the Assyrian 
religions are greater than their resemblances "i 

The Squire. Infinitely greater. There is 
much simplicity in the Jewish ritual, notwith- 
standing the daily Temple services, which 
stands in marked contrast to the swarms of 
gods, devils, and spirits of all kinds, good and 
bad, with the rites and ceremonies appropriate 
to them all. It is indeed a puzzle how great 
military conquerors like Tiglath-Pileser, Sar- 
gon, and Sennacherib could have found time 
for them. 

Foster. I suppose it was chiefly a mechan- 
ical work which their priests could do for them, 
— a sort of live praying-machine, not essen- 
tially different from the Tibet praying-machines, 
which they work, as travelers tell us, by hand 
or by water-power, for private or public wor- 
ship, as the case may be. But Isaiah speaks 
of these conquerors as if they had no religion 
at all, but were mere atheists. 

The Squire, Not unnaturally, though a nine- 



2o6 Talk at a Country House 

teenth-century philosopher like yourself may 
know better. But I am reminded of a curious 
parallel between the language in which Senna- 
cherib describes his treatment of Merodach- 
Baladan, king of Babylon, and that of Isaiah 
as to the fashion of the conquest of one of 
Sennacherib's predecessors. The Assyrian 
king says, " All his broad country I swept like 
a mighty whirlwind. Over their cornfields I 
sowed thistles." "He himself — for the fury 
of my attack overwhelmed him — lost heart, 
and like a bird fled away alone, and his place 
of refuge could not be found." And the Jew- 
ish prophet I might almost say rejoins, though 
his words are a little earlier in date, " For he 
saith. By the strength of my hand I have done 
it, and by my wisdom ; for I am prudent : and 
I have removed the bounds of the people ; . . . 
and as one gathereth eggs that are left, have 
I gathered all the earth ; and there was none 
that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or 
peeped." 

Foster. Should you say that the Assyrians 
had much civilization, in an ordinary use of 
the word ? 

The SquijY. Possibly as much as the Ro- 
mans had before they conquered Greece. Like 
the Romans, they loved great public works ; 
and the remains of their buildings amply con- 
firm us in supposing that Sennacherib said 



The Arrowheaded Inscriptions 207 

truly, " Of all the kings of former days, . . . 
though the central palace was too small to be 
their royal residence, none had the knowledge 
nor the wish to improve it. . . . Then I, Senna- 
cherib, ... by command of the gods resolved 
in my heart to complete this work." From 
this and other passages it is evident that 
Sennacherib was what the Romans called a 
great aedile. Then the Assyrians kept histori- 
cal Annals of the Empire, the truth of which 
is proved by their records of eclipses, which 
have been verified by modern astronomers. 

Foster. But, granting without reserve that 
our Assyriologists have really recovered the 
language and read the inscriptions, are we 
bound to believe all they tell us of the poetry, 
religion, and literature of this ancient country 
as fluently as if they were giving us an account 
of modern China or Japan ? 

The Squire. Hafiz says that the leader of 
the caravan cannot be without information 
about the road and the customs of the wayside 
halting-places ; and these learned men must 
know much more than we, and be able, as we 
are not, to look at things with eyes trained to 
use in twilight. On the other hand, it is not 
unreasonable to suppose that they may a little 
overrate what has been in fact a very wonder- 
ful discovery, or series of discoveries. I con- 
fess that when reading in good modern English 



2o8 Talk at a Country House 

the Assyrian story of the Creation or the 
Deluge, I have felt a certain relief, a sense of 
having a bit of firm ground under my feet, 
when I have come to the statement that from 
here the tablets are missing, or some lines of 
the writing are so mutilated as to defy deci- 
pherment. 

Foster. Like Sidney Smith's admiration for 
Macaulay's occasional flashes of silence. But 
I am sure you will be glad of more than a 
flash of silence after all this long talk. 



IX. 



TAKING LEAVE. 

There 's no use in weeping 
Though we are condemned to part : 
There 's such a thing as keeping 
A remembrance in one's heart. 

Charlotte Bronte. 

I WAS recalled to town, and had to bring my 
pleasant Somersetshire visit to an end. When 
I told the Squire, he said, "I am sorry you 
must go ; but a good host must speed the 
parting as well as welcome the coming guest. 
We have not had much to show you, except 
the humors of the general election. I hope 
you have not found your visit dull." 

Foster. Far from it. I have seen and heard 
so much that I wish I could sit down to look 
round and consider a little before I make my 
last day's march, like the soldier in the French 
story which one of the ladies read to us the 
other day. 

The Squire. You mean the description of the 
soldier returning home, who stops, when in 
sight of his native village, to look back on his 
past service before he finishes his concluding 
march. It is one of ;^mile Souvestre's idyls. 



Talk at a Country House 



— little pictures, — which are always so charm- 
ing ; but it ought to suit me rather than you, 
as it is the opening of his " Souvenirs d'un 
Vieillard." Old age comes in every variety of 
form. There are all sorts of men, soldiers, 
statesmen, men of business, of letters, of 
science, and peasants, who die in harness. 
There are some men and women whose powers 
of body decay, while their minds keep, or even 
add to, their original vigor; with others the 
mind — or perhaps it is really the brain — goes 
before the body ; while with others, again, 
there is a gradual and gentle decline of the 
powers of action both of mind and body to 
the last. And though we all instinctively feel 
death to be an evil for ourselves and for those 
who love us, yet a man may live too long, or 
at least till his life seems to have no further 
use than to point the moral that death is not 
only inevitable, but no less natural than life, 
so far as this world is concerned. 

Foster. You remind me of Swift's horrible 
picture of the Struldbrugs. 

The Squh-e. The caricature is frightful, but 
the likeness cannot be denied. It would be 
better for us all, for ourselves as well as for 
the young men in whose way we stand, if we 
old men took Swift's warning more to heart*, 
for the old man to die in harness is for the 
most part a mistake. He deludes himself 



Taking Leave 211 



when he thinks that his wider knowledge and 
greater experience will enable him to do the 
work as well as if he had still the young man's 
powers of action. 

Foster, Old age did not dim the artist's eye 
nor enfeeble the hand of Titian or Tintoretto, 
nor abate the military genius of Radetzky or 
Moltke ; and Michael Angelo was between 
eighty and ninety when he planned and su- 
perintended the building of the dome of St. 
Peter's, — hanging the Pantheon in heaven, as 
he said. 

The Squire. You carry too many guns for 
me. I might plead that artists are hardly men 
of action, or that exceptions prove the rule ; 
but I confess that I have "generalized from 
too few particulars." I was thinking chiefly 
of our old generals in the first Afghan war 
and in the Crimea, and our old statesmen in 
the last fifty years of our parliamentary history. 
Gibbon says, in his stately style, of one of the 
Roman emperors that he put an interval be- 
tween life and death. I believe he means that 
he abdicated and went into a convent ; but, 
without advising the conditions of the convent, 
I have no doubt that he is both the wisest and 
the happiest old man who does abdicate the 
functions of a life of action, and so in fact 
puts an interval between life and death. Thus 
he may sit down, pleasantly enough, in sight 



212 Talk at a Country House 

of his home, and, like Souvestre's conscript, 
consider. 

Foster. And tell us, whose service is still 
going on, something both interesting and in- 
structive about his own experiences in that 
service. 

The Squire. We will hope so. Indeed, I 
often think that there is a use to the world in 
the occurrence of this interval between life and 
death, if both the old and the young employ it 
rightly. But the old man must beware of the 
besetting sin of such old age. 

Foster, What is that ? 

The Squire. Garrulous twaddle. Shake- 
speare, whom no form or condition of man's 
life escapes, has given us the picture of this 
garrulousness in Dogberry, Justice Shallow, 
and Polonius ; but I need not quote him to you. 

Foster. Who is, or was, Souvestre "i 

The Squire. iSmile Souvestre was a French 
man of letters in what I suppose I must call 
the last generation, though he was only six 
years older than myself. The son of an offi- 
cer of engineers, and educated for the bar, he 
had early entered on a literary career in Paris, 
full of promise, when the death of his elder 
brother and the loss of the family property 
threw upon him the support of his widowed 
mother and sister-in-law. To provide for them 
he at once left Paris to enter on the humble 



Takinz Leave 



ig j^eave 213 



work of serving customers behind the counter, 
and doing the other retail business of a book- 
seller in Nantes with whom he found employ- 
ment. His literary ability and moral worth 
were soon recognized by one of those custom- 
ers, a deputy and a man of wealth, who was 
engaged in plans for the better education of 
his countrymen. Souvestre's services were en- 
gaged for the conduct of a college founded by 
this gentleman ; then he became a professor 
of rhetoric and editor of a newspaper at Brest, 
while occupying himself with other literary 
work also. Thence he eventually returned to 
Paris, where he spent the rest of his life, 
diversified only by visits to the provinces and 
to French Switzerland for the purpose of giving 
lectures to the crowded audiences which always 
welcomed him. He was eminently patriotic ; 
the ruling motive — I might say passion — of 
his life was the education (the culture, moral 
and religious, even more than the intellectual 
culture) of his countrymen. We English are 
apt to pride ourselves on our love of duty, but 
no Englishman makes duty the guiding star of 
his life more than did Souvestre. It is the 
keynote of everything he writes. And what he 
taught he had first tried and practiced in his 
own life. "In his own heart he first kept 
school;" and those who knew him most in- 
timately said that the sense of duty, which was 



214 Talk at a Country House 

always strong and even stern to himself, only 
showed itself in perfect love to those around 
him. 

Foster. What did he write ? 

The Squire. Though he died at the age of 
forty-eight, he left nearly seventy volumes. 
His history of his native and loved Brittany, 
"Les Derniers Bretons," is full of life and inter- 
est as well as of local and literary research, and 
is recognized as classical. But his chief lit- 
erary work — I speak not of his lectures, but 
of his books — was that of story-telling. He 
has given us an infinite variety of tales of 
French life in town and country, all of which 
are true idyls. The characters as well as the 
incidents are full of dramatic interest. The 
high and generous moral spirit which guides 
their destiny is never obtruded. It is the 
atmosphere which we really though uncon- 
sciously breathe. And though I do not pretend 
to pronounce judgment on style in any lan- 
guage but English, I think I may call that 
writing terse, lucid, and graceful which was 
crowned with the approval of the Academic 
Frangaise; but a still higher eulogy was be- 
stowed by that learned body upon Souvestre 
when they granted to his widow the testi- 
monial founded by M. Lambert in recognition 
of the man who had been most useful to his 
country. 



Taking Leave 215 



Foster. Have any of his books been trans- 
lated into English ? 

The Squire. His " Philosophe sous les 
Toits," " Confessions d'un Ouvrier," and two 
or three of the tales of Brittany were trans- 
lated by one with whose hand my own was 
joined in the task ; and of these the first was 
reprinted in America. His longer work, " Les 
Derniers Bretons," was, absurdly enough, trans- 
lated into English from a German version, — 
the consequence, as the publisher said to me, 
of the bad habit of not reading prefaces. And 
another translator has published one of his 
longer tales with the title of " Leaves from a 
Family Journal." 

Foster. Did you know him well ? 

The Squire. I feel ready to say Yes, though 
I never saw him. Here is his own way of an- 
swering the question in a letter to his transla- 
tor. (Takes a letter from a drawer and reads.) 

"Et maintenant, madame, permettez-moi 
d'ajouter de vifs et sinceres remerciments pour 
I'honneur que vous avez fait k I'auteur en 
choisissant son livre pour etre traduit dans 
votre langue ; c'est une distinction dont il se 
tient fort touche. Vouloir traduire un livre, 
c'est prouver qu'on entre en sympathie avec 
celui qui I'a ecrit, et qu'on sent, qu'on pense 
comme lui. II n'est rien de plus doux que ces 
adhesions obtenues de loin, et il y a un charme 



2i6 Talk at a Cou?ttry House 

particulier dans les amis inconnus qui repondent 
kvotre coeur sans que vous avez jamais entendu 
leur voix." ^ 

Of such unknown friends none lives so 
present to my memory as fimile Souvestre. 

Foster. That must be the best kind of mem- 
ory. But a memory for facts and words is a 
good thing, too, and must, I suppose, be an 
essential qualification for writing history. 

The Squire. Gibbon's memory must have 
been at once enormous and minute ; Niebuhr 
wrote down his quotations of chapter and 
verse without needing to refer to the books 
themselves ; Johannes von Miiller could re- 
peat the pedigrees of all the little German 
princes ; and Macaulay could tell the names 
in succession, and backwards as well as for- 
wards, of the Archbishops of Canterbury or 
the Popes, or both. A host of other instances 
of verbal memory crowd on me ; the prettiest, 
if not the most important, is the story of Pope 
reading his " Rape of the Lock " to Parnell. 

1 " And now, madam, allow me to add my most sincere 
thanks for the honor you have done the author in choosing 
his book for translation into your own language ; it is a dis- 
tinction which he feels very sensibly. To resolve to translate 
a book is to give proof of hearty sympathy with the writer of 
it, and of feeling and thinking like himself. Nothing is more 
gratifying than to receive such assurances of sympathy from 
a distance, and there is a peculiar charm in the unknown 
friends whose hearts answer to your own, though you have 
never heard their voices." 



Taking Leave 217 



Foster-. What is that ? I do not remember it. 

The Squire. Pope read the first canto of his 
new poem to Parnell. Parnell said, "I am 
sure I have heard those lines before, — I think 
in a monkish Latin original." Pope declared 
that they were all his own ; but Parnell per- 
sisted, and said he would find and send them 
to Pope. And on his return home he sent 
Pope — to his great annoyance till the truth 
was known — the Latin verses, which I think 
I can repeat, as well as Pope's own. Pope's 
lines are : — 

" And now, unveil'd, the Toilet stands display 'd, 
Each silver vase in mystic order laid. 
First, rob'd in white, the nymph intent adores, 
With head uncover'd, the cosmetic powers. 
A heavenly Image in the glass appears, 
To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears ; 
Th' inferior Priestess, at her altar's side, 
Trembling, begins the sacred rites of Pride. 
Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and here 
The various offerings of the world appear ; 
From each she nicely culls with curious toil, 
And decks the Goddess with the glittering spoil. 
This casket India's glowing gems unlocks, 
And all Arabia breathes from yonder box. 
The Tortoise here and Elephant unite, 
Transformed to combs, the speckled and the white. 
Here files of pins extend their shining rows, 
Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux. 
Now awful beauty puts on all its arms ; 
The fair each moment rises in her charms, 
Repairs her smiles, awakens every grace, 
And calls forth all the wonders of her face ; 
Sees by degrees a purer blush arise, 
And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes. 



2i8 Talk at a Country House 

The busy sylphs surround their darling care ; 
These set the head, and those divide the hair ; 
Some fold the sleeve, whilst others plait the gown; ' 
And Betty 's praised for labours not her own." 

And these are Parnell's : — 

" Et nunc dilectum speculum, pro more retectum, 
Emicat in mensa, quae splendet pyxide densS. 
Turn primum lymphi se purgat Candida nympha ; 
Jamque sine menda, coelestis imago videnda, 
Nuda caput, bellos retinet, regit, implet, ocellos. 
Hac stupet explorans, seu cultus numen adorans. 
Inferior claram Pythonissa apparet ad aram, 
Fertque tibi caute dicatque superbia ! lautfe, 
Dona venusta ; oris quae cunctis, plena laboris, 
Excerpta explorat, dominamque deamque decorat. 
Pyxide devota, se pandit hie India tota, 
Et tota ex ista transpirat Arabia cista : 
Testudo hie fiectit dum se mea Lesbia pectit ; 
Atque elephas lente te pectit, Lesbia, dente; 
Hunc maculis noris, nivei jacet ille coloris. 
Hie jacet et munde mundus muliebris abund^ ; 
Spinula resplendens aeris longo ordine pendens, 
Pulvis suavis odore, et epistola suavis amore. 
Induit arma ergo, Veneris pulcherrima virgo, 
Pulchrior in praesens tempus de tempore crescens; 
Jam reparat risus, jam surgit gratia visiis, 
Jam promit cultu miracula latentia vultu ; 
Pigmina jam miscet, quo plus sua purpura gliscet, 
Et geminans bellis splendet mage fulgor ocellis. 
Stant Lemures muti, nymphae intentique saluti, 
Hie figit zonam, capiti locat ille coronam, 
Haec manicis formam, plicis dat et altera normam ; 
Et tibi vel Betty, tibi vel nitidissima Letty ! 
Gloria factorum temere conceditur horum." 

You see they are a very exact representation 
of Pope, and monkish leonine hexameters. 



Taking Leave 219 



Foster. Why do you call them leonine, and 
where is the story to be found ? 

The Squire. I believe they are called leonine 
because a lion's tail has, or was supposed to 
have, a tuft in the middle, and another at its 
end. But as to where I got the story, — I got 
it from my father ; but whether you will find 
it in the books told as I have told it, I do not 
know. 

Foster. You have always a good memory, 
Squire, for this kind of story. 

The Squire. So my friends are kind enough 
to tell me. But I doubt it. I am certainly 
wanting in the sort of memory we were just 
now talking of, as possessed by Macaulay and 
others ; and I should say that, as far as my 
own observation goes, the recollection of good 
stories, family traditions, and other memories 
of a like kind, are not so much recollections 
of the things themselves as they actually hap- 
pened or were told, but rather pictures which 
have gradually taken shape and color in the 
narrator's imagination with such apparent dis- 
tinctness and reality that he seems to himself 
and his friends to be showing them a collec- 
tion of photographs, when in truth they are 
pictures in the composition of which there may 
be any amount of art combined with nature, 
and of fiction with fact. My brothers, old men, 
fond of family traditions and good stories, tell 



Talk at a Country House 



these each in a different way; and yet they 
are all clear headed and well informed. Sir 
Walter Raleigh asked how it could be possible 
to know rightly what happened in old times, 
when he found that he could not get accurate 
information as to something which was happen- 
ing under the very window of his prison. 

Foster. Then, like your Welsh or Irish judge, 
we must decline to hear more than one account 
of the matter, and write that down at once. So 
I hope I am well advised in keeping a journal. 

The Squire. 

" A chiel 's amang you taking notes, 
And, faith, he 'U prent it." 

Foster. Shall you object if I am lucky 
enough to find a publisher ? 

The Squire, No. I think we all like to see 
ourselves in print ; certainly I do. 

Foster. I have often wished that you had a 
Talking Oak in your avenue. 

The Squire. Or, still better, a Writing Bos- 
well, a ghostly predecessor of yourself, my 
dear Foster, who might appear from time to 
time from behind some sliding panel with his 
notebook, and read out his notes of the talk 
that has gone on for nearly six hundred years 
in this old house. If he could not tell us more 
than we know of the dispute between the two 
giants about the battlemented wall, he might 
tell us how to fill in the meagre outline of 



Taking Leave 221 



episcopal and royal records about William de 
Sutton and Basilia de Sutton (his aunt or 
sister, as I guess), who lived in the tower in 
the first half of the fourteenth century. 

Foster. What are those records ? 

The Squire. In 13 15, the bishop wrote to 
William de Sutton entreating him " of his 
charity " to undertake the guardianship of the 
mismanaged revenues of the neighboring nun- 
nery of Barrow; but the control was ineffectual, 
for, some years later, we find instructions to 
"restrain the prioress Joanna from wandering 
abroad," followed by a consistorial inquiry 
into the continual wasting of the revenues 
upon the burdensome family {pnerosa familid) 
and the lodgers of the prioress, in which in- 
quiry the sub-prioress was assisted by Basilia 
de Sutton, who was eventually herself made 
prioress after the death of Agnes, who had 
succeeded for a few months on the resignation 
of the discredited Joanna. But William de 
Sutton's services to the Church did not prevent 
his maintaining his claims against her. In the 
placifa, or " Pleas "of 1322, we find him com- 
plaining before the king's judges of the tres- 
pass of the servants of the rector of the adjoin- 
ing parish of Stanton Drew, and the parson's 
servant replying that he, the parson, had the 
right of pasturage after the crop had been 
taken ofL 



22 2 Talk at a Country House 

Foster. The old, never-ending feud of squire 
and parson. But how was it that the knight 
did not take law into his own hands, and seize 
the rector's cows without more ado ? 

The Squire. I remember suggesting this very 
question to Freeman here in the tower ; and he 
said that we must not think of the mediaeval 
knights in England as if they had the habits 
of those robber knights of Germany and 
France ; for in England there were very few 
such men. The English mediaeval knight, he 
said, was for the most part a man carrying on 
perpetual small lawsuits at Westminster about 
rights of land. That ghostly Boswell could 
tell us when the tower was built, and who 
added the " old Manor Place " where Leland 
found Sir John St. Loe ; what was the talk 
that went on between the knight and his vis- 
itor, who so accurately observed and carefully 
recorded everything that he saw or heard: — 
then we might hear how, in the next genera- 
tion. Building Bess talked over her plans for 
improvement and those talks between John 
Locke and John Strachey, to the renewal of 
which Locke looked forward with so much 
pleasure on his return from Holland. 

Foster. You told me the other day who wrote 
the article on Nonsense in the " Quarterly," 
so you can tell me something about the unpub- 
lished Eclogue which is alluded to, but not 
given, in the article. 



Taki7is: Leave 



223 



The Squire. Here it is. The " competitors," 
as the Clown in *' Twelfth Night " would have 
called them, are Mr. and Mrs. Symonds, who 
were, like Lear himself, spending the winter at 
Cannes. You may take this copy, — I have 
another ; and when you '' prent " your notes, 
put this Eclogue into them. There will be no 
breach of confidence in doing so. (The Squire 
reads.) 

ECLOGUE. 
(Composed at Cannes, December 9, 1867.) 
Edwardus. What makes you look so black, so glum, so 



cross 



Is it neuralgia, headache, or remorse ? 

Johannes. What makes you look as cross, or even more 
so,— 
Less like a man than is a broken torso ? 

Edw. What if my life is odious, should I grin ? 
If you are savage, need I care a pin ? 

Joh. And if I suffer, am I then an owl ? 
May I not frown and grind my teeth and growl ? 

Edw. Of course you may ; but may not I growl, too ? 
May I not frown and grind my teeth like you ? 

Joh. See Catherine comes ! To her, to her, 
Let each his several miseries refer : 
She shall decide whose woes are least or worst, 
And which, as growler, shall rank last or first. 

Catherine. Proceed to growl in silence. I '11 attend, 
And hear your foolish growlings to the end : 
And when they tc done, I shall correctly judge 
Which of your griefs are real or only fudge. 
Begin ; let each his mournful voice prepare, 
(And, pray ! however angry, do not swear !) 

Joh. We came abroad for warmth, and find sharp cold ; 
Cannes is an imposition, and we 're sold. 



224 T<^^k ^^ ^ Country House 

Edw. Why did I leave my native land to find 
Sharp hailstones, snow, and most disgusting wind ? 

Joh. What boots it that we orange trees or lemon see, 
If we must suffer from such vile inclemency ? 

Edw. Why did I take the lodgings I have got, 
Where all I don't want is ? All I want, not ? 

Joh. Last week I called aloud, Oh ! oh ! oh I oh I 
The ground is wholly overspread with snow ! 
Is that, at any rate, a theme for mirth 
Which makes a sugar-cake of all the earth ? 

Edw. Why must I sneeze and snuffle, groan and cough,' 
If my hat 's on my head, or if it 's off ? 
Why must I sink all poetry in this prose, 
The everlasting blowing of my nose ? 

Joh. When I walk out, the mud my footsteps clogs ; 
Besides, I suffer from attacks of dogs. 

Edw. Me a vast awful bulldog, black and brown, 
Completely terrified when near the town ; 
As calves perceiving butchers, trembling, reel, 
So did my calves the approaching monster feel. 

Joh. Already from two rooms we 're driven away, 
Because the beastly chimneys smoke all day : 
Is this a trifle, say ? Is this a joke, 
That we, like hams, should be becooked in smoke ? 

Edw. Say ! what avails it that my servant speak 
Italian, English, Arabic, and Greek, 
Besides Albanian .? If he don't speak French, 
How can he ask for salt, or shrimps, or tench ? 

Joh. When on the foolish hearth fresh wood I place, 
It whistles, sings, and squeaks before my face ; 
And if it does, unless the fire burns bright. 
And if it does, yet squeaks, how can I write ? 

Edw. Alas, I needs must go and call on swells ; 
And they may say, " Pray draw me the Estrelles." 
On one I went last week to leave a card : 
The swell was out, the servant eyed me hard. 
" This chap 's a thief disguised," his face exprest. 
If I go there again I may be blest ! 

Joh. Why must I suffer in this wind and gloom ? 
Roomatics in a vile cold attic room t 



Taking Leave 225 



Edw. Swells drive about the road with haste and fury, 
As Jehu drove about all over Jewry. 
Just now, while walking slowly, I was all but 
Run over by the Lady Emma Talbot, 
Whom not long since a lovely babe I knew, 
With eyes and cap-ribbons of perfect blue. 

Joh. Downstairs and upstairs eve-y blessed minute 
There 's each room with pianofortes in it. 
How can I write with noises such as those, 
And being always discomposed, compose ? 

Edw. Seven Germans through my garden lately strayed, 
And all on instruments of torture played ; 
They blew, they screamed, they yelled. How can I paint 
Unless my room is quiet, which it ain't ? 

Joh. How can I study if a hundred flies 
Each moment blunder into both my ej-es ? 

Edvj. How can I draw with green, or blue, or red, 
If flies and beetles vex my old bald head ? 

Joh. How can I translate German metaphys- 
ics, if mosquitoes round my forehead whizz ? 

Edw. I 've bought some bacon, (though it 's much too fat,) 
But round the house there prowls a hideous cat ; 
Once should I see my bacon in her mouth. 
What care I if my rooms look north or south ? 

Joh. Pain from a pane in one cracked window comes, 
Which sings and whistles, buzzes, shrieks and hums ; 
In vain amain with pain the pane with this chord, 
I fain would strain to stop the beastly diszox^ ! 

Edw. If rain and wind and snow and such like ills 
Continue here, how shall I pay my bills ? 
For who through cold and slush and rain will come 
To see my drawings, and to purchase some ? 
And if they don't, what destiny is mine ? 
How can I ever get to Palestine ? 

Joh. The blinding sun strikes through the olive-trees, 
When I walk out, and always makes me sneeze. 

F.dw. Next door, if all night long the moon is shining 
There sits a dog, who wakes me up with whining. 

Cath. Forbear ! you both are bores, you 've growled enough : 
No longer will I listen to such stuff 1 



226 Talk at a Country House 

All men have nuisances and bores to afflict 'um ; 

Hark, then, and bow to my official dictum ! 

For you, Johannes, there is most excuse, 

(Some interruptions are the very deuce ;) 

You 're younger than the other cove, who surely 

Might have some sense ; besides, you 're somewhat poorly. 

This, therefore, is my sentence : that you nurse 

The Baby for seven hours, and nothing worse. 

For you, Edwardus, I shall say no more 

Than that your griefs are fudge, yourself a bore. 

Return at once to cold, stewed, minced, hashed mutton, 

To wristbands ever guiltless of a button, 

To raging winds and sea, (where don't you wish 

Your luck may ever let you catch one fish ?) 

To make large drawings nobody will buy, 

To paint oil pictures which will never dry. 

To write new books which nobody will read, 

To drink weak tea, on tough old pigs to feed, 

Till springtime brings the birds and leaves and flowers. 

And time restores a world of happier hours. 

Foster. It is very good, and certainly ought 
to find a place among Lear's works. It is 
quite a new kind among the many sorts of 
Nonsense, the variety of which is one of their 
characteristics. Did you know Lear well ? 

The Squire. I was not one of his early 
friends ; but I had friends among these, and 
latterly I saw him often, here, or in his own 
house, or mine, on the Riviera. He was a 
warm-hearted, affectionate man, with a craving 
for sympathy expressed in his whole manner, 
and which was no doubt heightened by his 
having no more of home life than was afforded 
him by his old Albanian man-servant and his 



Taking Leave 227 



tailless cat Foss. He loved children, as his 
nonsense books so abundantly bear witness ; 
and many of his songs and stories were either 
written for this or that child, or given to him 
or her, in his own handwriting and with his 
own inimitable pictures. One of my nieces 
had " The Owl and the Pussy Cat," and one 
of my sons "The Duck and the Kangaroo," 
and " Calico Pie," in what may be called 
the originals, — one of them in a letter signed 
" Yours affectionately, Derry down derry 
dumps ; " and my daughter has a series of 
heraldic representations of Foss, proper, cou- 
chant, passant, rampant, regardant, dansant, 
a-'untin, drawn for her on the backs of letters. 
His letters to his grown-up friends were em- 
bellished in like manner. When he wrote to 
ask me to inquire about a new hotel above 
the Lake of Como, where he had thought of 
spending the summer till he heard a report 
that there was smallpox there, he illustrated 
the inquiry by a sketch of himself covered 
with spots ; and when writing to ask where he 
could hear of some friends who always traveled 
with a lapdog, he represented the dog over- 
topping the whole of the party. He some- 
times, too, sent his grown-up friends some of 
his verses ; he sent me the then unpublished 
conclusion of Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos. 
Foster. I have heard that the connoisseurs 



228 Talk at a Country House 

of art — critics, or whatever you call them — 
see some fault in his serious pictures, but I 
forget what it is. They seem to me very good, 
especially those taken on the Nile. But only 
a true artist could have drawn those nonsense 
outlines in all their variety. Then, too, how 
appropriate is the music to which he married 
his immortal caricature of pen and pencil ! 
But is it true that much of this music has been 
lost to us because he did not know how to 
write down what he had composed .? 

The Squire. I fear it is so ; though he pub- 
lished some of the music to which he has so 
admirably set not only his own comic verses, 
but several of Tennyson's songs. There is 
much more that can now live only in the 
memory of those who knew and loved him. 
I say "loved," because he was eminently a 
man of whom it might be said, — 

" And you must love him ere to you 
He will seem worthy of your love." 

I recall the image of the genial old man, with 
his black spectacles, or rather goggles, his 
gaunt figure, and his face expressive of mingled 
fun and melancholy, as he showed us his pic- 
turesque house at San Remo, or, later in the 
day, sat down at the piano in our room at the 
hotel, and played and sang to his own music 
his own pathetic nonsense of the "Yonghy 
Bonghy Bo." It may seem absurd to you, as 



Taking Leave 229 



it certainly would to many people, to say that 
in that song, so overflowing with nonsense, 
the old man was making fun of his deepest 
thoughts and feelings, — fun because they lay 
too deep for words. Villa Tennyson, so named 
after his friend, was a bachelor's home of 
mixed comfort and discomfort, with its gar- 
den of half-tropical flowers going down to the 
shore on which the blue Mediterranean was 
ever lapping, while the thick olive woods were 
sloping up the hills. It is impossible not 
to think of the abode " in the middle of the 
woods, on the Coast of Coromandel, where 
the early pumpkins blow," or to look up and 
down in imagination the dusty highroad which 
runs east and west, and not expect to see the 
heap of stones on which the Lady Jingly Jones 
might be sitting, with her milk-white hens of 
Dorking. I have not the least ground for 
saying that these fictions have any foundation 
in fact ; but there they are, as the good old 
man has given them to us. 

Foster. Do you think that Lear would have 
said, with Wordsworth's Matthew, — 

" If there be one who need bemoan 
His kindred laid in earth, 
The household hearts that were his own, 
It is the man of mirth " ? 

The Squire. I do not know ; but the " house- 
hold hearts " of old Matthew were those of 



230 Talk at a Country House 

wife and child, and these Lear had not. You 
are right to remember that Wordsworth is not 
deploring old age generally, but the old age of 
the man of mirth. Wordsworth liked paradox, 
as his great " Ode on Immortality " shows ; and 
those beautiful lines on Matthew are full of it. 

Foster, What do you mean by paradox ? Is 
not what he says true ? 

The Squire. It seems to be becoming the 
fashion to use " paradox " as a fine expression 
for " false ; " but " paradox " properly means 
" contrary to common opinion," and it may be 
used in either the good or the bad sense. It 
may be a true or a false statement, according 
as the popular opinion which it contravenes is 
right or wrong. In the poem you refer to, 
Wordsworth, with dramatic propriety, puts into 
the mouth of Matthew the paradoxical asser- 
tion that 

" the wiser mind 
Mourns less for what age takes away 
Than what it leaves behind." 

Now, this is untrue as a general proposition, 
though true of the particular case to which 
Matthew afterwards limits it; and the para- 
doxical effect is produced by his first putting 
it forward as if the general proposition were 
true. It is not true that the old man who can 
no longer see to read regrets this less than he 
does that he can still see the trees and the 



Taking Leave 231 



sunshine and the faces of those dear to him ; 
for he does not regret at all, but is very glad 
that all these are still left to him. It is be- 
cause so much is left behind that the old man 
is able to bear with so little regret the loss of 
what age takes away. But when Matthew goes 
on to define and limit his statement, it becomes 
clear and true enough. He is speaking" of the 
" man of mirth," of the man of mirth in his 
old age, whose kindred are in the grave ; then, 
when tender but now hardly sad memories of 
the " household hearts that were his own '* 
come upon him, and he can say, " The will of 
God be done," it jars on him to be asked to 
play the fool for the amusement of the thought- 
less though affectionate 3^outh who knows no- 
thing — for he has had no experience — of 
these things. 

Foster. You spoke of dramatic propriety. I 
suppose you refer to Wordsworth's own ex- 
planation that he had not given a matter-of-fact 
description of the active old schoolmaster of 
Hawkshead, but a poetical picture, in which, 
as in that of the Wanderer, he had introduced 
traits of character from other men, so as to 
make a dramatic whole. These are not his 
words, but, if I remember rightly, this is the 
sense of them. 

The Squire. So I understand him. True 
poet as he is, he gives us no abstract philo- 



232 Talk at a Country House 

sophical disquisition on old age in general, or 
portrait of an actual old man ; nor, what would 
be no less undramatic and untrue to nature, a 
picture of a Frankenstein in whom all char- 
acteristics of all old men are brought into an 
impossible combination. Those three poems, 
" Matthew," " The Two April Mornings," and 
*' The Fountain," make up one work of art of 
a very perfect kind. It will bear any analysis 
and any criticism, and come out all the brighter 
and the more beautiful. 

Foster. I see what you mean. The Matthew 
of Wordsworth is an ideal man, and so having 
the individuality, and therefore the limitations, 
of any real man, and without which he would 
be a mere monster, and not a man at all. He 
is " a gray-haired man of glee," who even in 
his old age still carries his love of fun to such 
a height that it may be properly called " mad- 
ness." But in all this mad fun there come 
intervals of deep melancholy and sadness, 
such as indeed I suppose we all have noticed 
in men of wild high spirits. So much I see ; 
but does he not mean more than this ? 

The Squire. The poet brings out the rest by 
the introduction of the other personage of the 
drama, himself, as he was the youthful, and 
therefore thoughtless though affectionate com- 
panion of the old man. In after years he 
remembered, what he could not at the time 



Taking Leave 233 



understand, that, in answer to his youthful 
demand for renewed fun, old Matthew would 
give way to the melancholy reflection that men 
like himself 

" Are pressed by heavy laws ; 
And often, glad no more, 
We wear a face of joy, because 
We have been glad of yore." 

It is not the loss of his Emma which now 
makes him sad, — he can think of it, and say 
from his heart, "The will of God be done;" 
but he thinks that if he had still with him "the 
household hearts that were his own," he might, 
like the birds, sing his merry carols, or be 
silent and forgetful at his own will, and not 
be bound, as he now is, to pay that heavy price 
for the affection, real though it is, of his 
youthful friend. What a pathos there is in the 
reply of the old, childless man to the youth's 
offer, at once affectionate and thoughtless, — 
what should he know of death? — when he 
offers himself to supply the place of the chil- 
dren gone ! 

" Alas ! it cannot be." 

Perhaps we might say that the craving, the 
unsatisfied craving for sympathy, at any cost, 
is the keynote, the motive, of this beautiful 
little trilogy. Yet those are not the last words. 
The poet, true to life and to his art, ends with 
the old man, after all, singing again the witty 



234 -^^-^ ^^ ^ Country House 

rhymes about the crazy clock. Soldiers strike 
up a merry tune as they march back from the 
burial of a comrade. Joy, not sorrow, is the 
last word. 

" The dead are not dead, but alive ! " 

It was time for me to be going. We joined 
the ladies in the Great Parlor, and the elder 
lady said, "We are sorry you must go, Mr. 
Foster, but I hope you will keep your promise." 
The Squire asked, "What was that.? " And his 
daughter-in-law replied, "We told Mr. Foster 
of the custom of the Guest Book at my un- 
cle's, in which every visitor is expected to 
write something, on his going away. And we 
proposed that he should give us some such 
farewell." 

The Squire. Well, Foster, what did, or do, 
you say ? 

Foster. I quoted Puffendorf and Grotius, or 
at least Shakespeare and Walter Scott : — 

" Stand not upon the order of your going, 
But go at once ; " 



and 



"'On, Stanley, on!' 
Were the last words of Marmion : " 



and I suggested, though the lines were not 
very complimentary to myself, — 

" He fitted the halter and traversed the cart, 
And often took leave, yet seemed loath to depart." 



Taking Leave 235 



But I was told that none of these were original, 
and so I promised to produce something of my 
own. 

The Squire. And what is it ? 

Foster. I must make a confession. I had 
cudgeled my prosaic brains to no purpose, 
vainly trying to say something appropriate. 
Then I thought of your translation of what 
Sa'di had said on a like occasion ; and I have 
made a paraphrase of that. (Takes a paper 
from his pocket and reads.) 

Through France and Germany I 've wandered, 

And sometimes laughed, and sometimes pondered 

How men in country and in city 

Were rude or friendly, dull or witty. 

I 've lived in Naples and in Rome, 

But nothing like this English home 

In all my travels did I find. 

No place so fair, no folk so kind. 

Nor of such genial heart and mind. 

And now my holiday is done. 

And I, unwilling, must be gone. 

I still would keep the memory green i 

Of all that I have heard and seen : 

The Giant's battlemented wall. 

The portraits hanging in the Hall, 

The Terrace and the Waterfall, 

The Limes, the Oaks, the old knight's Tower, 

My lady's Parlor and her Bower ; 

The welcome of the eldest Son, 

When he the Election fought and won ; 

The pleasant talk we had together, 

" What news to-day ? " or " How 's the weather? " 

Then changing to a loftier strain, 

'T would rise and fall, and rise again, 



236 Talk at a Country House 

And tell of all I loved to hear : 

Of Shakespeare, Milton, Maurice, Lear; 

Of Persian Poets ; how men read 

The language of the Arrowhead ; 

Of Love and Marriage, Life and Death ; 

Of worlds above, around, beneath. 

Nor, Ladies, is the day forgot 

When we rode down to Camelot, 

And Arthur, Launcelot, and Elaine 

Seemed in that hour to live again. 

And though I take a careless leave, 

Nor wear my heart upon my sleeve, 

These memories never will decay 

Nor fade into the light of common day. 

The Squire. Bravo, Foster ! Your version of 
Sa'di reminds me of Sir John Cutmore's silk 
stockings, wtiich were mended with worsted 
till there was not a thread of the old silk left. 

Foster. I do not pretend to compare myself 
with Sa'di ; but if I had five minutes to spare, 
I should like to appeal to the judgment of the 
ladies, as to the silk stockings, by reading your 
translation of the Persian lines.-^ 

Then came the English good-by, which says 
so little and means so much ; and as I left the 
room I heard the Squire say, half to himself, 
*' And, faith, he '11 prent it." 

I crossed the north court, and as I passed 

through the gateway in the wall I looked back, 

and saw the Squire, with his children and 

grandchildren, standing at the door under the 

tower. 

1 See Appendix. 



APPENDIX. 

INTRODUCTION TO THE BUSTAN OF SHAIKH 
MUSHLIHU-D-DIN SA'DI SHIRAzf. 

I desire to acknowledge that, though not unfamiliar with 
the original, I have, from lack of eyesight or a Persian reader, 
availed myself in making this translation of the more literal 
version and the notes of Colonel H. Wilberforce, Clarke, R. E. 

IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE MERCIFUL, THE COM- 
PASSIONATE ! 

In the Lord's name 1 Who did all life create ! 
The Wise ! Who taught man speech articulate ! 
The Lord, the Giver, the Help in time of need ! 
The Merciful I Who hears when sinners plead ! 
The Great ! From Him who so shall turn away, 
Greatness shall seek in vain, seek where he may; 
Kings, who lift up their heads in pride of place, 
Bowed down before His throne themselves abase. 
He is not quick to judge the unruly heart, 
Nor pleading culprits sternly bid depart. 
The Sea of Knowledge, infinite, divine, 
Doth in each drop two elements combine : 
Justice and Mercy, — neither of these can fail ; 
He sees the sin, and, pitying, draws the veil. 
Though evil deeds bring down the wrath of Heaven, 
He who turns back, repentant, is forgiven. 
Against a father should a son rebel, 
Unmeasured wrath the father's breast will swell : 
Displeased, the kinsman owns his kin no more, 
And drives him like a stranger from his door ; 



238 Talk at a Country House 

If to thy friend thou shouldst unfriendly be, 

He breaks the fellowship and flies from thee : 

The servant slothful in his daily tasks 

Promotion of his master vainly asks : 

And if the soldier in his duty fail, 

No plea will with his king and chief avail : — 

But He, Lord of the noble and the base, 

Against no rebel shuts the door of grace. 

The fair Earth is his table, duly spread ; 

He asks not, " Friend or foe ? " Welcomed are all, and 

fed. 
If he were quick to mark iniquity. 
Who from His anger could in safety be ? 
His nature knows no change : His kingdom stands 
Needing no help from man's or angel's hands. 
All things, all persons, serve His kingly state ; 
Man, beast, fowl, ant, and fly, upon Him wait. 
For them His Bounteous table He prepares ; 
Which even the lonely, far off Simurgh 1 shares. 
That bounteous love in all His works He shows ; 
He grasps the world, and all its secrets knows. 
His Will is law. His greatness all things own, 
Whose kingdom is of old, with rivals none. 
On one man's head He sets a monarch's crown, 
One from a throne He to the dust brings down. 
From Him the cap of fortune this receives. 
To that the beggar's garb of rags He gives. 
If He should bid unsheath the avenging sword, 
The Cherubim, silent, obey His word : 
Should He proclaim the fulness of His grace. 
The Lost One cries, " I, too, have there a place." 
Before the greatness of His royal state, 
The great ones of the earth their pride abate ; 

1 The Phoenix or Griffin of Oriental legend dwells at the 
end of the world. 



Appendix 239 



To those who are distressed, in mercy near, 

And ready still the suppliant's prayer to hear. 

Things yet to be are present to His eye, 

Secrets untold before Him open lie. 

All heights and depths confess his guardian hand; 

Before his judgment seat all peoples stand : 

None but bow down before Him and obey ; 

None on His work a censuring finger lay. 

Planned in His mind unborn creation stood, 

He called it forth, and saw that it was good. 

From East to West the Sun and Moon He sent 

And o'er the waters spread the firmament. 

The world with earthquake reel'd till on its edge 

He firmly fixed each mountain like a wedge. 

The sons of men in angel's form He made. 

But must not paintings on the water fade ? 

He sets the rose upon the branch of green, 

Ruby and turquoise hides in rock unseen. 

Should seed on land, raindrop on ocean fall,i 

This makes the pearl, and that the cypress tall. 

No atom can to Him remain unknown 

To Whom the seen and the unseen are one. 

For snake and ant He daily food prepares, 

Although nor hands nor feet nor strength are theirs. 

All things to be He in His mind portrayed ; 

Of things that are not, things that are, He made : 

Then bade all things to nothingness return 

Yet there to wait the resurrection morn. 

His Godhead is eternal, all confess : 

His substance and His essence none can guess. 

His Majesty and Power are infinite : 

No eye can take them in, no words recite. 

The bird, Imagination, soars in vain, 

1 The Eastern poets held that the pearl was a drop of rain 
which had fallen into an open oyster, and there been trans- 
muted. 



240 Talk at a Country House 

The hilltops of His being to attain : 

Reason, upon a sea of storm-tost waves 

Embarked, those whirling waters vainly braves : 

A thousand ships have in that sea gone down, 

And not one plank upon the shore is thrown. 

Whole nights I sat, lost to the world around, 

As were my spirit on some journey bound : 

When a strange terror took me by surprise, 

And plucked me by the sleeve, and said, " Arise." 

God, by His knowledge, rules His kingdom well : 

The mazes of His Nature none can tell. 

His substance hidden deep from human eye. 

His attributes, by thought unfathomed, lie. 

To Souhbar's 1 eloquence we may attain. 

To know God's nature we shall search in vain. 

Rash man upon this quest may urge his horse. 

But words of warning 2 check his eager course : 

It is not always well to ride at speed ; 

'T is sometimes better to hold in your steed. 

And should the traveller find that hidden way. 

The door of his return is shut for aye. 

Who of the chalice at that banquet drink. 

Entranced, their senses in oblivion sink. 

That hawk has seeled eyes to Heaven unturned, 

This with eyes open, and with feathers burned.^ 

None on the treasure of Karoon * has come, 

Or, finding it, has found the road back home. 

He who that journey and that search would make. 

Thought of return forever must forsake. 

Perfumes of Love Divine around thee play, 

1 An Arab poet. 

2 La ahsa. " His praises are more than can be numbered." 
I suppose the words are from the Koran. 

3 That is, by the fire of divine love. 

4 A hero of the family of Moses and Aaron in Arabian 
legend, supposed to possess great treasures. 



Appendix 241 



He asks, " Am I thy God ? " 1 Thou answ'rest, " Yea." 
Seek out with earnest search the things above ; 
Thence to God's Presence rise on wings of love. 
By Truth the veils of earth and sense are riven, 
And Glory is the only veil of Heaven.^ 
Seek'st thou by earthly roads to find thy way ? 
Surprise will seize thy rein and bid thee stay. 
Only man's Guardian has crossed o'er that sea, 
And those whom he has bidden — "Follow me." 
He who has journeyed on, without this Friend, 
Worn-out, has failed to reach his journey's end. 
Oh, Sa'di, think not man has ever gone 
Along the Path of Holiness alone, 
But only he who treads behind the Chosen One. 

IN PRAISE OF THE PROPHET: TO HIM BE PEACE. 

Generous of disposition ! Full of grace ! 
Prophet and Intercessor of our race ! 
Chief of the Prophets ! Leader of the road ! 
Faithful to God ! Where Gabriel found abode ! ^ 
The Guide ! The Intercessor ! Lord of all 
Gathered for judgment at the last Great Call ! 

1 It is related of the preexisting souls of the descendants 
of Adam, that were to be, that each was asked by the Creator, 
" Am I thy God ? " Each soul that answered " Yes " was born 
to be a follower of Muhammed, while those that were silent 
were born to be infidels. 

2 The sara-pardah — the curtain drawn before the throne 
of the Eastern king, to hide him from the public gaze. So 
the veil before the Mercy seat in the Jewish Temple was the 
symbol of the invisible king. And the words of Sa'di, " there 
remained no Sara Pardah but glory," correspond exactly to 
those of St. Paul : " Dwelling in the Hght which no man can 
approach unto." 

8 Faithfully recording in the Koran the revelations brought 
down by Gabriel from God. 



242 Talk at a Country House 

Speaker from out the heavenly Sinai's height ! 

All other lights but borrowed from that light ! 

His one Book, while it yet unfinished lay, 

Purged libraries of other faiths away : 

When he in wrath the sword of terror drew 

By miracle he cleft the Moon in two ! 

His fame, when through the world its course it took, 

The Courts of Kings as with an earthquake shook ! 

"THERE IS NO GOD BUT GOD:" — Lo! at that 

sound 
The idols Lat and 'Uzza bit the ground.^ 
Those idols' dust he scattered to the wind 
While ever the truer faiths he left behind. 
One night he sat, in vision rapt, and through 
The Heavens he passed, as towards God's throne he 

drew, 
And through the angel hosts he passed his way 
In majesty and grandeur more than they : 
He onward passed the nearer road to find 
While even Gabriel remained behind. 
" Mount boldly higher " (the Prophet thus began), 
" Thou Bearer of the Word of God to Man : 
When thou didst me sincere in friendship prove, 
Why didst thou thus draw in the reins of love ? " 
Gabriel replied, " No power to mount have I ; 
Higher my wings are powerless to fly : 
Should I one hair's breadth higher attempt a flight 
I burn my wings in that effulgent light." 
None for his sins in prison need remain 
Who can, for guide, a lord like thee obtain. 
To thee what praise acceptable can be ! 
O Prophet of our race, peace be on thee ! 
May angels' benedictions on thee rest, 

1 Lat or AUiat and Al 'Uzza were two of the three idol god- 
desses of the Arabians which were destroyed by Muhammad. 



Appendix 243 



And with thee be thy friends and followers blest 1 

O happy Guide, no loss of dignity 

Falls on thee in the Court of the Most High, 

"When some poor humble uninvited guest 

Goes in with thee to share the heavenly feast. 

God's praise and honor rested on thy head 

While Gabriel kissed the ground where thou didst tread. 

The Heavens bow down before a higher than they, 

Not made, like man, of water and mere clay. 

First of create existence thou ; from thee 

All else existent only offshoots be. 

What can I say to thee ! No words of mine 

Can speak the praises that are rightly thine : 

It matters not : the Book, in heaven-sent words 

To all thy greatness honor due accords.^ 

What more can Sa'di, humble poet, say ? 

Prophet, blessings be on thee alway ! 

THE REASON FOR COMPOSING THE BOOK. 

Through many far-off lands I, wondering, went ; 
With men of every kind my days I spent : 
To me each comer did some pleasure yield, 

1 gleaned some ears from every harvest field. 
So pure of heart, and of such humble mind, 
None like the men of Shiraz did I find : 
Blest be that land ! It won my heart away 
From cities famous for Imperial sway. 

'T was pain to leave a garden all so fair, 

And not some token to my friends to bear. 

Methought, when travellers from Egypt come, 

They bring back sweetmeats to their friends at home : 

And if no sweetmeats in my hand I bring. 

Words sweeter far than sugar poets sing. 

1 Alluding to the words in the Koran, " But for thee, O 
Muhammed, I had not created the sky." 



244 ^^^k ^^ ^ Coufttry House 

Those sugared sweetmeats men but seem to eat, 

In books the wise store up the real sweet. 

A palace of Instruction then I framed, 

And set therein ten gates, which thus I named : — 

First, Justice, Counsel, Order, How kings should reign, 

And in the fear of God their rule maintain : 

The next Beneficence, by which we can 

Praise God in dealing forth His gifts to Man. 

The third, Love : — not of passion and of sense 

In man, but Love of God, deep and intense. 

The fourth. Humility : Resignation next. 

The sixth. Contentment, by no troubles vexed. 

The seventh, Education ; how to rule 

^And train yourself, and in your heart keep school. 

The eighth, Thanksgiving for the Almighty's care : 

The ninth. Repentance ; and the tenth gate, Prayer. 

In an auspicious day, and happy hour. 

And in the year six hundred fifty-four,^ 

My Book I finished, filled this treasury 

With store of pearls, of truth and poetry. 

But still I fear my jewels to display ; 

And on my hands my head in doubt I lay ! 

For oyster shells and pearls are in one sea, 

One garden holds the scrub-bush and the tree, 

Yet have I heard, O man of generous mind, 

The generous critic loves not fault to find ; 

The silken robe with gay embroidery shines, 

Yet that silk robe a cotton quilting lines. 

Then if the cotton in my verse you see, 

Be not severe, but hide it generously. 

I boast not of my costly wares, but stand 

And humbly ask for alms with out-held hand. 

I have heard that in the day of hope and fear, 

1 But that "rhymes the rudders are of verses," this date 
should be 655 a. h., answering to 1250 A. D. 



Appendix 245 



That day when all before the Judge appear, 
He will, in mercy, bid them all to live, 
And for the righteous' sake the bad forgive. 
Thou, too, if badness in my verse shouldst see, 
Do thou likewise : be merciful to me. 
When in a thousand one good verse you find 
Withhold your censure, be humane and kind. 
Of such a work as mine 't is true, indeed. 
That Persia land of letters has no need : 
Far off with awe you hear me, like a drum. 
But find the music rough when near I come. 
You say, What brings this Sa'di, bold-faced man } 
Roses to rose beds, pepper to Hindustan ? 
So, too, the date with sugar-encrusted skin: — 
You strip it back, and find a bone within. 

THE PRAISE OF ABU BAKR.l 

I was no courtier, born and prompt to sing 
With courtier's tongue the praises of a king : 
But in the coming times might question be 
Of one who threaded pearls of poesy ; 
When Sa'di bore the palm of verse away 
Who then was King ? " Abu-Bakr," we might say. 
No unfit boast — the Prophet even would tell 
That in the Just King's days his own birth fell.^ 
Oh, Guardian of the faith, the law, the throne. 
No name since Omar's has like thine been known ! 
Chief of the chief ones, crown'd among the crown'd, 
And still for justice through the world renown'd ; 
He who seeks shelter from life's stormy blast 
Here, and here only, shelter finds at last ; 

1 The reigning Atabak. The Atabaks named by the poet 
were in succession from father to son, Zangi, Sa'd, Abu Bakr, 
Muhammad Sa'd. 

2 Naushirwan. Muhammad says, " I was born in the time 
of the Just King," 



246 Talk at a Country House 

Welcome that door to all who fly from wrong 

As men by each broad road to Mecca throng. 

In no land else so rich a heritage 

I see for prince and people, youth and age. 

No sorrower to this prince his grief imparts, 

But finds with him a balm tor suffering hearts. 

About his crown the skies their splendor shed, 

While on the ground he humbly bows his head. 

'T is natural that the poor should sue and wait : 

But humbleness shows goodness in the great ; 

The common man the common road has trod. 

The humble ruler is a man of God. 

The monarch's liberal doings now may hide, 

The sound thereof though all the world spreads wide. 

So wise a man, so worthy of his lot, 

The world, since world it was, remembers not. 

In this thy day no sorrower grieves for wrong 

Wrought by the Oppressor's grasp unjust and strong. 

Such Government, such customs, and such law 

Not ev'n Firidun ^ in his glory saw. 

Great is his honor in the Almighty's sight, 

That he upholds the weak ones by his might. 

Over the world his shadow so is spread 

That lawless force awakes in age no dread. 

Men bear with groans, in every age and clime, 

The changes and the violence of the time. 

Oh, mighty monarch, under thy just reign 

Of wrongs of time and fortune none complain. 

Thy people dwell in peace ; but after thee, 

I know not what that people's end will be. 

But happy thine own fortune, on that morn 

When Sa'di in thy land and day was born. 

So long the sun and moon still climb the sky, 

The memory of thy name shall live for aye. 

1 Firidun was said to have reigned in Persia in 750 B. C. 



Appendix 247 



If former kings a name for good have won, 

They learned the way to walk from sire to son : 

But Thou, by thine own rule, dost far outshine 

The gathered glories of a royal line. 

Alexander built a wall of stone and brass 

The hordes of Gog and Magog might not pass r^ 

When o'er the world the hordes of Changis roil'd 

The wall that saved thy kingdom was of gold. 

The poet who, in thy just rule secure, 

Sings not thy praises, let him sing no more. 

Oh, sea of bounty, of all gifts the mine. 

We seek for aid and find our life in thine. 

I cannot count the virtues of the king, 

Nor can within this book their record bring, 

If Sa'di would thy virtues tell aright, 

Truly another book he must indite. 

But cease from thanks for all thy generous care : 

'T is better that I spread the hand of prayer ! 

The world be at thy feet, and Heaven thy friend I 

The world's Creator keep thee and defend ! 

Thy star, ascendant, lights up all the skies, 

And with its fire burns up thine enemies. 

Let not the revolutions of the age 

Bring grief to thee, on thee pour out its rage : 

A single sorrow in the heart of kings 

To a whole world a world-wide sorrow brings. 

Tranquil and prosperous be thy heart and land, 

Blest be the kingdom guided by thine hand. 

Like thy true faith, sound may thy body be ! 

Weak, like his own false creed, thine enemy ! 

1 The Eastern legends of Alexander tell that he built a 
wall of brass and stone to keep out Gog and Magog, that is, 
the Scythians. The later hordes of Changis (or Changes) 
Khan, resembling the earlier ones in their devastations and 
probably of the same race, were bought off by Abu-Bakr. 



248 Talk at a Country House 

May God's strength fill with joy thine inward parts. 

And in thy faith make glad thy people's hearts ! 

May'st thou with the Creator mercy find. 

Should I say more 't were empty talk and wind. 

It is enough that the Almighty one 

Doth still increase the welfare of thy throne. 

Sa'd did not quit the world with pain, when he 

Begat a son to be renowned like thee. 

That such a noble branch as this should spring 

From the pure stock of Sa'd, count no strange thing; 

For though his body to the dust be given, 

His soul triumphant dwells in highest Heaven. 

O God, send showers of grace and mercy down, 

And make the memory green of Sa'd's renown ! 

With guiding hand fulfil his grandson's claim, 

To share Sa'd's honor as he shares his name. 

IN PRAISE OF MUHAMMED SA'D, SON OF ABU-BAKR. 

Son of Abu-Bakr ! heir to crown and throne ! 
Muhammed Sa'd ! good fortune all thine own. 
Fresh in thy fortunes, wise among thy peers : 
Old in deliberation, young in years ! 
Lofty in spirit, and in wisdom great, 
Strong in thine arm, with hope thine heart elate. 
Happy the mother of the time to be, 
To cherish at her breast a son like thee ! 
No river floods of bounty pours like thine ; 
Thou risest, and the Pleiads cease to shine. 
The eye of fortune beams upon thy face 
Chief among Monarchs in thy pride of place. 
The oyster holds the pearls, yet know we well 
The pearl 's the pearl, the oyster but the shell : 
Thou art that hidden pearl of price we see, 
The jewel of the royal house in thee. 
O God, preserve him by Thy grace from high t 
Keep hun from injury and the evil eye I 



Appe?idix 249 



O God, through every land increase his fame ; 

And make all men love him who loves Thy Name. 

Now and hereafter grant his heart's desire, 

To dwell in justice, and to Heaven aspire! 

Make the devices of his foes to fail ; 

Nor revolutions of the world prevail ! 

The Tree of Life still bears new fruit thereon ; 

The son still seeks the fame his sire has won. 

All who speak evil of this House, beware, 

Full evilly they and all their house shall fare. 

Hail, Faith and Knowledge! Law and Justice, Haiil 

Hail, Land and Throne, may that rule never fail I 



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